Thirty years ago, I lived in the US for three years. I had one or two culture shocks but the most startling one came after, while I was travelling around Europe and settling down in England.

At the time, Europeans looked down on Americans as naïve and unsophisticated even more than they do today. But to anyone who lived in the US, it was obvious that the US was the trendsetter and Europe the follower – not just in technology but in culture; not just in high-minded research but in high-street fashion.

The same thing has been happening in politics. The Americanisation of European politics has not just happened at the technical level – as with polling, where the most important new techniques are usually developed in the US and then travel across the Atlantic.

There has also been an Americanisation of the issues. The fine gradations of the multiple European political party system are being aggregated into a polarisation between conservatives and liberals – the telltale Americanising mark being the shift in the meaning of ‘liberal’, from the European sense of economic conservative to the US sense of social libertarian.

Granted, in European states the political parties are generally many, not two as in the US. Even there, however, the contrast is not as great as it seems. In the US, the political parties are much looser organisations, clearly embracing wide differences within themselves – as can be seen in the current US primary debates.

So you don’t have to be particularly overexcited to think that, by following the US primary and presidential contests, you may be looking at Europe’s future. Not necessarily a future that will be replicated faithfully but a pattern. Not even necessarily a future that must come to pass but certainly a strong possibility on the horizon unless we do something about it.

The New Hampshire vote just two days ago is of enormous significance to the participants but, if we’re interested in peering at the future, it’s something else that we should look at: the media settings in which the debates are taking place.

This year’s cliché is that voters are spurning the media pundits, as they are supposedly spurning even the political establishments. But that, itself, is a cliché spun by the media itself.

It’s not that policies do not continue to be made but that they are not debated

In a not-so-odd way, it suits the media to present itself to the audiences as being spurned. An election that’s full of surprises boosts TV ratings.

This year’s primary contests are genuinely surprising given the performances of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders – a schoolyard bully and a socialist are not supposed, according to the conventional wisdom, to be doing so well in the national polls, not at any rate for so long.

However, you might say that it’s no surprise to have surprises. Every US primary has them. The snakes and ladders games of polling keep the TV ratings high. The reporting of every poll – even though not all pollsters have the same reputation for reliability – makes sure that the political arena looks more like American wrestling. It’s often the case that the gladiator who was supposed to win does get the prize in the end but not before being thumped by the bully or the clown once or twice.

This year, it’s different but only to a degree. We can talk about the Sanders surprise – a self-declared socialist doing well in national polls. But that doesn’t mean that the media haven’t played a significant part in shaping the reaction to him.

Out of about 300 minutes of primary coverage in 2015, Trump, a candidate with no policies but lots of insults, got roughly a quarter. Sanders obtained only an iota of a sliver of that.

If you think this is justified by the fact that Sanders is a marginal figure, you’re forgetting that the media’s role is to report, not just opine. If national polling figures justify giving Trump lots of coverage, then Sanders (no matter what you think of him) should be getting a lot more. The national polls in 2015 showed him beating just about every possible Republican candidate in a general election – often with a greater margin than Hillary Clinton.

That, of course, was only a snapshot of public opinion at a moment in time. But it was worth reporting earlier and more thoroughly.

Nor is this only a matter concerning the Democrats. In the Republican field, the same has happened with respect to a candidate like Jeb Bush.

He is no moderate in politics; he is moderate only in demeanour. But his manner of speaking was allowed to get him tarred as being ‘low energy’, when on the real stage – the political one, not the media one – talking like an insulting bully will retard action, not precipitate it.

You might say that it was Trump that did all the insulting. But it was the media that gave the insults oxygen, repeating his insults as part of an endless loop, which made the media stage seem like the real political stage.

What this year’s US presidential contests shows up is an exacerbation of a trend long in the making, evident even in a political laggard like Malta. It is the coexistence between a high sophistication of technique (in polling, targeting and coverage) and the infantalisation of politics, where the style of politics pushes aside the substance.

It’s not that policies do not continue to be made but that they are not debated. It’s not that journalism does not hold politicians to account but that they hold them to account for how they perform on the media stage, not for how they would perform on the stage that really matters.

The prospect before us is not entirely unfamiliar nor is it entirely foreign. In many areas of life – marriage, work, sport – becoming engrossed in the daily grind can lead to forgetting why you thought the grind was worth it in the first place. When that happens to us personally, our lives drift. When it happens to our politics, the entire country does.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.