We hear the word “populism” a lot these days but what we are witnessing is not really populism in the traditional sense of the word. The entertainer politicians we are seeing don’t address the “populus”, a collectivity joined by a shared set of concerns. Instead, they address loners in front of screens whose only goal is to receive, from the screen, a momentary relief for the discomfort of the moment.
Tomorrow, the discomfort in need of a band-aid will be different, and the entertainer politician will easily say the exact opposite of what he said yesterday. And the lonely spectators won’t care because they don’t live in the world of an uninterrupted flow of time. Their vision of time is that of a collection of isolated moments they can record and post on Instagram or Twitter for the benefit of a bunch of isolated loners in front of screens.
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