Washington, D.C., is Hollywood for ugly people.
That old joke is the best description of our failing politics, as the seat of global power has now become the center of American entertainment.
Burning brighter than any Tinseltown star, Trump and Schumer, Johnson and Jeffries, JD, Barack, and all the rest now command the nation’s attention with a force that would have made a Hollywood publicist blush.
Cable networks and online publications that once focused on the news have been transformed into political versions of Photoplay and Confidential, focusing on the contretemps, scandals, and feuds embroiling the country’s leading men and women.
Breathless coverage of pressing issues is cast through the lens of personality. “What is to be done?” has been replaced by “Who said what about whom?” The minute one election has been held, the focus immediately turns to the next campaign as part of the endless effort to map the fortunes of the stars. How much 2025 ink has already been spilled about 2028?
Where Hollywood was once our dream factory, D.C. has become our great engine of nightmares. Its chief products are anger, division and distraction. The Romans may have popularized the concept of bread and circuses, but our leaders and press corps have perfected it. It is the politics of sound and fury.
Where Shakespeare’s rumble signified nothing, our storm is more akin to Nero’s fiddling as Rome burned. America is bedeviled by a litany of widely acknowledged problems: Health care and housing are increasingly unaffordable, our schools are failing, and government and personal debt are long past the danger point. Neither party has much to offer in response besides tired mantras about “fighting” on behalf of their voters and simplistic slogans instead of solutions: Single payer! School choice!
The reasons for this sorry state of affairs are legion. But screenwriter William Goldman’s arch quote about Hollywood captures its root cause: “Nobody knows anything.”
Partisans peddle the fantasy that they know what works, but the bad guys on the other side just won’t let them create Utopia or make America great again. Our problem is not the lack of consolidated power or even the lack of will to make things right; it’s a poverty of ideas. If there were easy fixes for what ails us, we probably would have done it already. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be many hard fixes in the offing either — the fact that most developed countries are struggling with the same issues suggests no one has the answers.
The seemingly intractable nature of our nation’s many challenges helps explain the ping-pong nature of modern politics, as power in Washington bounces between the two parties. Fed up with Democrats, we handed Republicans the reins — forgetting that we’d just kicked them out because of their ineffectiveness. Wash, rinse, repeat.
In fairness to our leaders, no easy cures for what ails us are in sight. The size, scope, responsibilities, and competing interests of government are so immense that they may be beyond the capacity of mere mortals to control them. We may celebrate Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos as visionary business people, but OpenAI, Tesla, and Amazon are piddling enterprises compared with Uncle Sam. Running the government is exponentially more challenging — as Musk may have learned during his short time leading DOGE.
Where the primary concern of tech companies is how to make their artificial intelligence breakthroughs pay off, political leaders have to respond to the myriad, hard-to-predict fallouts from those advancements — including the unwelcome specter of massive job losses. Businesspeople may get fat bonuses as robots replace human workers, but it is elected officials who will be expected to make everyone whole. Good luck with that.
In a Hollywood movie, a savior would stride into town. The good news is that a happy ending may be possible. But our white knight is likely to look more like R2-D2 than Gary Cooper. As our politics increasingly focus on personality and emotion, we may need to turn to faster, stronger, better technology to deliver us from the wilderness. If a computer can beat Garry Kasparov at chess, maybe it can figure out the national debt. Siri, how do we get out of this mess?
It won’t be perfect — some will claim the computers are rigged, many others will be unwilling to sacrifice anything. On the bright side, our politics can’t get much worse.
America doesn’t have to ride into the sunset.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire. J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2025/11/06/commentary-american-politics-needs-a-hollywood-ending/
