Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
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So as the year comes to a close, I wanted to dust off some episodes I think have some renewed relevance right now. If you've listened to the show for a while, you've probably heard me bring up some of the mid-century media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, these people who were thinking about how TV and visual media would reshape politics and society. And this election felt like, I mean, it was beyond, I think, what they would have predicted. There's Trump, of course, a reality TV star who runs his campaigns and in some ways his administrations like a reality TV show. Many of his picks come from the TV and entertainment world. Chris, you had people like Dana White and Hulk Hogan introducing Donald Trump on the final night of the Republican National Convention. So the episode I'm sharing today, which was taped in 2022, offers a framework for thinking about that TVification of politics. It's a conversation with my friend Sean Illing, the host of the Gray Area podcast and a co-author of the book, The Paradox of Democracy.
Enjoy. From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In their new book, The Paradox of Democracy, Zach Gershberg and Sean Illing make a simple but radical argument. They write, quote, it's better to think of democracy less as a government type and more as an open communicative culture. Their point there is that democracies can end up in many types of governments. We tend to think of liberal democracies, but that's only one possibility. You can have illiberal democracies. Democracies can vote themselves into fascism. Democracy doesn't guarantee you any particular outcome. And so what drives a democracy, what decides what it becomes or what it stays, is that open communicative culture.
The way its members learn about the world, debate it, and ultimately persuade each other to change it or not change it. And communicative cultures are shaped by the technologies upon which they happen. Oral cultures are different than textual ones. Radio is different than TV. Twitter is different than TikTok or Facebook. Political scientists spend a lot of time theorizing about democratic institutions and how elections work, but communicative institutions and the cultures and technologies by which we communicate, they get a lot less attention. And I guess I'm a member of the media, so I would think this, but I think it's a huge mistake. I've become almost obsessed in recent years with Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, the great mid-20th century media ecologists. I honestly think you have to pick any two theorists to act as guides to our current moment. You could do a lot worse than them. And so I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about them and to talk with other people trying to apply them to our current political age.
So I was thrilled to see this book hit my desk. Sean Illing is one of the authors. He is a PhD political theorist who switched careers and became a journalist, which has always given him, in my view, an interesting dual perspective. He is the interviews writer at Vox, and he sits in my old chair hosting the podcast Vox Conversations. As always, my email, if you want to have an open, communicative culture with me and the team here, is EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com. Sean Elling, welcome to the show.
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
So you and I, I think, have come to share a fascination with Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, who are these mid-century media critics. And man, I really think that if you want to understand the modern era, you need to read them. So people may have heard McLuhan's famous line, the medium is the message. What does it mean?
Well, it basically just means that the forms of medium we use determine the content, right? So you can think about it like this. And this is the way Neil Postman, who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, put it. I mean, his book is a kind of indictment of TV, but he actually loved junk TV. He thought it was very entertaining. The problem is that the news and politics, because it relied on TV, had to ape the mechanics and the logic of TV. It had to be entertaining. And I was listening to some interviews that he did the other day, and he used Sesame Street as an example here. What he was saying is that Look, it's not that kids don't learn how to spell when they watch Sesame Street. Surely they do. And that's great.
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