(LifeSiteNews) — The behavior of politicians in a time of war reveals much of the trickery used to manipulate their populations. The chief interest of our technocratic managerial class is to appear influential and imposing in the media. Serious expressions are worn, while grave and solemn slogans are intoned. It amounts to an attempt to strike a resonant note in the mind of the spectator. In this system, we the people are assigned to the role of the audience and little more.
There are two motivations for the political performer: one is to survive in office to the next day, the other is to survive in the memory of the population. This second aspect is the cherished “legacy” they wish to curate – which amounts to securing a durable impression in the popular imagination. It is branding, and the product is themselves.
To approach the enactment of politics in the mass media age in this way is to uncover some of its abject obscenity. Public feeling is stimulated in the hope it can be attached to a name and thereby build a legend, which in turn secures a lucrative career. This is the goal of professional politicians, members of a class selected precisely for their resemblance to components in a vast machine. This reason explains much of their desire to stand out, and to cultivate for themselves some image of unique stature and significance. The quickest route to this attractive makeover is to adorn themselves in the imagery of some departed grandee.
In the United Kingdom, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been careful to cultivate a Churchillian persona. This attempt to exchange his buffoonish nature with that of the iconic leader of Britain in the Second World War is a shameless gambit which began under lockdown and continues to the present day. Johnson’s never-ending quest for attention and the borrowed mantle of gravitas has seen him pose before flags and frowning whilst taking liberties. Along with the basic ones we had formerly taken for granted, a further liberty was taken in adopting the image of a prime minister identified with the defense of freedom while engaged in its removal.
That politicians ape past leaders is obvious. That they do so while traducing everything those leaders represented reveals the moral poverty of our political class, which effectively helps itself while the electorate is stupefied with grandstanding displays of false piety.
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In the United States, the trick is played with the invocation of “Our Values.” These values, often summarized as representing democracy, freedom, and the rules-based order, are usually invoked when someone else’s freedom and order is about to be destroyed. Again, the flag is present, and again the proud values of a nation are wheeled out in service of a base and nihilistic agenda whose devastating costs will be borne by the people for whom this stirring deception has been confected.
The appeal to the past is strong. It is atavistic – it resides in the reversion to a former type, whether real or imagined – and is intended to promote a temporary but powerful sense of unity against which it would be almost seditious to argue. While effective in the short term, being delivered through a coordinated mass media machine, the result over time is to rapidly corrode both national unity and the belief in the genuine values which once underwrote it.
With the unspooling of each patriotic misdirection comes disenchantment, sapping the morale of a population whose repeated exposure to this type of dishonest over-stimulation results in the annihilation of genuine sentiment. Where emotion and attachment to the ghosts of the past are repeatedly summoned in service of some agenda, the ability to discern between what is worthy of strong feeling and what is not simply degrades. To use the population in this way is to wear them out. It is humiliating to discover you have been used in this way, and the common remedy is to feel and care less about everything.
This too is a benefit to managerialism, which profits from popular disengagement with politics. If people can be made to feel and care less about everything, then two outcomes are likely. They will only be motivated by the most spectacular media efforts, and they will ignore the shabby and unglamorous daily business of politics. This places power in the hands of those who control the mass media machine, and relieves them of consequence for their many misdeeds.
The use of vestiges to shape public opinion is to conduct government by ghosts. Some of this fabled past is true, some not, most of it a product itself of the media machine which delivers the current thing to the minds of the news consumer. What kind of politics do we have when the popular impression of being informed relies on memories of television and films? We have a politics of narratives, of tales told by idiots for the purpose of ensuring they remain onscreen to deliver another episode, featuring themselves.
The past we genuinely cherish is being destroyed not only by its misuse in political costume drama, but also in the aggressive destruction of our institutions, customs, and religion by a post-humanizing agenda. Again, the fact of this loss is a profit to power, because the more distant and evanescent the treasures of our heritage, the more appealing it is to remember them fondly.
To smash our culture and then dress up in its relics is a perverse form of theatre. What is employed in these despicable appeals for the hearts and minds of the population is not merely the ghosts of politics past, but the ruins of a civilized and human-scale way of life these managers have done most to destroy.
The ideology with which we are presented is deliberately insincere, and it trades on the immense cultural and spiritual value bequeathed us from a time before its ascendancy. It has nothing to offer but a spectral nostalgia, as it pushes us forward into a time with nothing to envy. Such a bankrupt system is inherently unstable. Its displays are less convincing with every turn. The degradation and disaffection it breeds is unlikely to be contained indefinitely.
To summon bygone spirits in this way is a foolhardy prelude to a grim return. How long can this ritual go on, before the spectre appears at the feast like the ghost of Macbeth? To the vapid politicians, concerned only with the power of appearance to dismiss reality, there are no consequences to reckless action.
What happens when people rediscover a meaning of freedom and democracy that might take place off-screen? The ghosts of the past have much to teach us about the remedies for a politics gone awry. They may very well come back to haunt those who have profited in the misuse of their name.