Today’s great electoral skill is the ability to harvest resentment. The psychology is simple. Identify with a large demographic that feels looked down on. Fuse your anxieties with theirs. Always be entertaining. Above all, treat voters as a delivery mechanism for your ends: power, status and more money. Policies are for wonks. Celebrity is for winners. Those who find a way to tap mass insecurity have struck political gold.
It has also done wonders for the media business. Donald Trump learnt many of these skills from Roy Cohn — the notorious New York lawyer who taught him that shame was an affliction of the weak. If you lacked squeamishness, the world was your oyster. Fortune favoured the brazen. It was Cohn who introduced the US president to Rupert Murdoch in 1976 after he bought the New York Post. Mr Trump’s antics helped sell newspapers, which, in turn, gave him the celebrity he craved. Their relationship changed the west’s democratic course. But it was Mr Murdoch who made it possible.
Think of it as bringing a West End hit to Broadway. Mr Murdoch produced a New York version of what he had already worked in Australia and Britain — that mix of prurience and hard politics; popular fare and oligarchic control. Fox News is its apotheosis. Long before Mr Trump came of age, Mr Murdoch was seeding the ground for his kind of politics. Both were born into wealth — Mr Murdoch inherited an Australian newspaper; Mr Trump a New York property portfolio. Each resented those who were still more privileged. Such angst is unquenchable. It has become the reigning id of our time.