Rise and fall of the politician-influencer

If the influencer's message can ignore reality and facts, the failure of political action is sterilized and hidden. The letter from the lawyer. Antonio de Grazia

Dear director,

Master Apota Riccardo Ruggeri states that the politician has become an influencer. That is, politics has undergone a metamorphosis, both in method and in propaganda: execution matters less and less, and words, communication, marketing, the shaped message that can well ignore reality, elude the facts. .

Influencer is the continuation of politics through other means.

The influencer has his followers, a loyal base of users, hypnotized so to speak by a sequence of messages/communications/videos, sometimes direct and sometimes cryptic.

The influencer bases his power, his charisma, on irrational effects. If the influencer's message can ignore reality and facts, the failure of political action is sterilized and hidden. The politician-influencer, as long as he is perceived (and perception, according to the mainstream press, prevails over the rest) as the subject who creates the dominant opinion, survives and thrives.

But when the politician loses the aura of influencer, his fall – often dizzying, ruinous – is imminent, if not irreversible.

The political influencer fuels irrational feelings, the emotionality of his claque audience: that is, he wants cheering. And typhus is in itself Manichaean, sectarian, aggressive: the other is not just an adversary, but the enemy, the stinker, the irrecoverable, the leper, the devil, evil.

The Jacobin instinct of the guillotine for the enemy, for the counter-revolutionary, is always present. And the court of myths, apparently, tricoteuses frames the increasingly violent, murderous typhus (the end justifies any means).

The wise GC Lichtenberg said:

Golden rule: men should not be judged by their opinions, but by what these opinions make of them.

So it is, if you like.

Antonio de Grazia

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/politico-influencer/ on Sat, 20 Jul 2024 06:45:02 +0000.