IS TRUMP AMERICA'S BERLUSCONI? HAVE CITIZEN-VOTERS BEEN REDUCED TO AUDIENCE, SUSPENDING BELIEF?

Elena Ferrante, Fantumaglia: Papers: 1991-2003; Tesserae: 2003-2007; Letters: 2011-2016, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2016) ("If the great work of the entrepreneur Berlusconi is what we have before our eyes every evening, how could it happen that half of Italy believed that he really could, as he says, fix the nation? [] It's the credulity not of citizens but of the audience that I find narratively interesting. If I were capable of writing about our Berlusconian Italy not through allegories, parables and satires, I would like to find a plot and characters that could represent the mythology within which the symbol Berlusconi is dangerously encysted. I say symbol because the man will disappear, his personal troubles and those of his management have their power, one way or another the political struggle will remove him from the scene, but his ascent as supreme leader within democratic institutions, the construction of his figure as a democratically elected economic-political-television duce, will remain a perfectible, repeatable model." "A model that naturally has a history . . . Berlusconi, for me, is the most garish expression (for now) of the traditional illusionism of politicians, of their capacity to pretend, even within the democratic institutions of which they should be the willing servants, that they are benevolent divinities on some Olympus from which they govern the fates of wretched mortals. That illusionism (which has fed both democracies and totalitarians: I think among other things of the of the invention of the body of the leader, of the macho, of the best, the body like a saint's reliquary, of a heavenly nature) unfortunately for us has been definitely welded, thanks to a bold propriety relationship, to the fictions of what is today the most powerful means of mass communication: television, that factory of characters and protagonists, as the media call them, justly adopting the terminology of products of the imagination. And the characters, the protagonists of social-television mythology, are experienced by the audience just a characters are in novels, by suspending disbelief, accepting, that is, an agreement on the basis of which you are willing to take as true everything you are told." Id. at 92-93 Also see generally Elaine Blair, "Ferrante's World," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/6/2016. QUERY: Trump the Berlusconi of the United States. What construction of Trump's figure rendered the ascent of Trump America? Are forty million-plus American voters an audience willingly suspending belief regarding Trump and his claim that only he can fix it and make America great again?  Politics as entertainment? Unfortunately, many will be hurt by the election results. Food for thought.).