Paragraph of the Day (Sad, but True Edition)
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, December 28, 2011
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5 comments
“American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation’s airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one”—Glenn Greenwald.
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Major props to Roger Ailes and the Fox-ification of American politics. We couldn’t have done it without you, Fox!
You can thank Bill Clinton for the never-ending campaign cycle. You can thank unionized K-12 public school teachers and administrators for the large-scale dumbing down of the populace, which in turn necessitates in this day and age the reality TV component of presidential campaigns. I seriously doubt Greenwald could perceive much less to understand the attendant ironies.
Explain to me how our current population is dumber than the population of the USA circa, oh, 1920.
I mean, I get it: reality TV is annoying. Stupid people are annoying. And it’s really tempting to believe we (wherein “we” means “other people I’m stuck with”) are descending into Idiocracy. But I don’t think that’s actually true.
@Rob in CT: Well, Mencken in the 1920s did refer to the “boobocracy.”
An explanation will not be forthcoming, as Tsar Nicholas is a drive-by commenter who never sticks around to provide evidence or even defend the lurid trash he leaves here…