Philosopher Douglas Giles recently advanced an intriguing hypothesis in “Our World Is a Diasimocracy.” His entire article is a good, tight brief and worth reading in its entirely. And what I will discuss here will all be my own thoughts and claims about that (so don’t blame him for it!). But the gist of his point that I want to build on here is that we don’t live in the political system we think we do. Unlike, say, democracy (“rule of the people”) or oligarchy (“rule of a self-selected few”) or autocracy (“rule of an individual strongman”) or aristocracy (“rule of a self-selected elite social class”), or even (as now in popular use) kleptocracy (“rule of whoever steals the most shit”) or (what most people might mistakenly think we live in now) plutocracy (“rule of the wealthiest”), a diasimocracy is (by iotacism) a rule of the diasêmoi, the famous.
And Giles does not mean this merely because of celebrities becoming political leaders (like Trump, Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Ventura), though in a sense that is a symptom; but rather in the broader sense that would include even Biden, Obama, and Bush: people who gain access to power do not get it by virtue of merit or even the careful consideration of voters, but by simply being famous enough. This does not entail they will be incompetent; rather, it means their competence is not really all that relevant to whether they even have a chance to win a seat of power. The example Giles gives is of social media and just media generally: famous influencers (the most subbed, liked, talked about) are the only meaningful influencers. Not in the sense of having something worthwhile to say (the substantive sense of “meaningful”), but in the sense of actually impacting the masses and hence actual political outcomes (the cynical sense of “meaningful”).
In other words, merit is increasingly sidelined for “fame,” and thus people flock to the ideas, and believe what they are told by, and vote for whoever is “famous” enough. I would say Elon Musk is a good example of this. One might be distracted into thinking his access to power derives from his wealth. But plenty of billionaires would never have a shot at it (they can only machinate in backroom dealing and thus can easily be overruled by those actually in power). And his wealth is clearly not the shared metric. A lot of the Trump administration is populated on a basis of fame rather than competence or wealth.
RFK, Jr, is a perfect example of this. He has literally no competencies. Nor is especially rich (Musk spent twenty times RFK’s entire net worth on the election and that to Musk was mere loose change; and Trump’s election cost ten times even that). Yet RFK, Jr, is famous enough that people who “feel” good about any things he says (since, acting on feelings rather than reason, they can ignore anything bad he says and thus forget it ever happened), that they are excited to see him in power, and take steps to make that happen. That an American President and the U.S. Senate would even consider him for the cabinet illustrates diasimocracy at work. Whereas any other lunatic who said exactly the same things he does no one would ever even give the time of day, much less elect (or appoint, or approve the appointment of), because they are “nobody.” They lack fame.
In a plutocracy we would see this play out as “they lack sufficient wealth” to control anything politically and thus really “be in charge.” But in a diasimocracy it’s “they lack sufficient fame.” So, even if someone is famous, all else being equal, the more famous contender wins—both mass attention, and power. The “all else being equal” does count. So, someone famously hated or feared can’t win power, which is why AOC easily wins power in her district, but would face a hard challenge winning over the whole country (who have been sold a false narrative of her—and, well, are also a bit racist and sexist, let’s be honest). But even if she did it, it won’t have been because of her being right, and being competent, and deserving—it will be because she got famous enough. People will then just emotionally decide whether they “feel” good about her or not, or “feel” better about her than whoever she is running against. But if people feel more or less the same about either, if she is the more famous, she will win. Pit her against Vance, and she outfames him. He’d struggle with the centrist emotionalists he needs to win. Pit her against some Mr. Whosethat and she will have even better odds. This is why elections cost so much now. They are not won by disseminating information (that could be done at a thousandth the cost). They are won by manufacturing fame.
Thus Biden won in 2020 because he was “safe” (he was a boring old-guardsman who made liberals and centrists feel safer than, not just the crazy and erratic Trump, but even “the dangerous” Warren or Sanders), but he could never have won had he not been famously safe. He was “recognizable,” he had a potent “halo effect” from the wildly famous Obama (who would trounce Trump in a third term election), and he had a long history that kept him in political news for decades and thus “familiar” to everyone. That Warren and Sanders had a shot is also due to their being famous, whereas the (then) relatively unfamous Pete Buttigieg and the (still) relatively unfamous (yet super-rich) Michael Bloomberg couldn’t rally even a shot—because they weren’t “famous enough.”
By any objective scoring on merit, Buttigieg probably outranks every one of these people (even if only by a little, though in some cases a lot). But merit is irrelevant. And so is “the careful consideration of voters,” since while maybe a third of voters carefully consider who they vote for, a third isn’t enough to elect anyone. Which means the emotional two thirds of voters decide all elections: people who vote on pure “feelings,” not on any basis of reason or evidence or even the merest of logics. And feelings react to fame. The candidate with the most fame who still makes most voters “feel” safer than their opponent wins every election now. In 2024 the scary black lady toting foreign (and certainly not sufficiently Aryan) blood made too many Americans feel unsafe. She also lacked sufficient fame (Biden’s halo was trifling compared to Obama’s).
Giles links this to “the widespread availability of mass media and online interconnectivity,” i.e. the internet, and not just that, but what the free market has settled it into, which is a computerized system of influence and attention metrics: “likes,” “shares,” “subs,” “ratios,” “engagement rates.” Hence “the economic and political structures that mediate information” now “are themselves mediated by the social gravity of celebrity.” The masses (hence voters but even just the vectors of mass perception generally) “are drawn to those who are famous” and “people assume that if one is famous, that makes one interesting, even fascinating,” and thus, many a voter or rube will assume, correct or good or best at something—someone you can trust.
Which has the effect that Giles accurately describes (as you might from your own experience realized):
If given the choice between reading something written by a celebrity or something written by a noncelebrity, the vast majority of people will read the celebrity’s writing. Not because it is good or contains truths, but because people are drawn in by spectacle and celebrity status. In fact, I suspect that most people will prefer a poorly written article from a celebrity even if they are told there’s a better one written by a nobody.
Note we are speaking in percentages here. “Most” or “vast majority” will not mean everyone, so it might not include you, but you will likely have to admit that most people do act like this (mostly people you will never meet and would be perplexed by, but that’s most people now). And that’s what drives the engines of power today: influence and access are gained by fame, not quality. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ranks as only the fifteenth most liberal member of Congress (or 10th depending on how you count). The first position has five other people tied for it—and odds are, you’ve never heard of any of them, and even you might be hesitant to vote for them; the average zero-information voter, even less so. And those voters are the ones deciding elections now, and thus deciding who rules over us all.
This explains a lot. It explains the rise of mass delusionality, for example. People don’t decide what information sources to consume based on any kind of actual metric of reliability or trustworthiness, but simply based on who is more famous—and in particular, famous within their ideological alignment. Hence, siloing. This explains a key finding in my Vital Primer on Media Literacy. There I had focused on the epistemic failure—people are deciding reliability based on delusional mythologies rather than real measures, circularly presuming any source that disagrees with them is unreliable, and any source that says what they want to hear can be trusted. That’s true (as documented even in the centrist anthology The Poisoning of the American Mind). But I didn’t then realize what Giles is now saying: that this is all a part of diasimocracy. People trust fame. Hence FOX and Newsmax depend on cultivating fame for their pundits; because their nobody newsreaders get less views. And people are not flocking to higher quality conservative content (like The National Review or The Cato Institute), but the more splashy, emotional, fame-grabbing stuff (like FOX News and Twi[X]ter). Only some believe fake news when it comes from a nobody, but most do when someone famous endorses it (by “retweeting” it or equivalent). And so on. That’s how we got “Haitians eating pets.”
Hence Giles expands Aristotle’s axis of political systems, with meritocracy (“rule by the most competent and informed”) and diasimocracy (“rule by the most famous”):
Meritocracy is the positive form in which what information is distributed is based on the skill of the creators and the high quality of content; experts are prized. Diasimocracy is the negative form in which what information is distributed is based on the fame of the creator, regardless of the quality or value of the content; experts are ignored.
The Trump administration is a perfect crystalization of this effect. The same effect has not happened abroad yet, but the trends don’t look good. America is the only true diasimocracy so far. But the disease could spread. And even if Trump gets replaced with someone competent, who realigns our cabinet to a standard of expertise rather than popularity, they will still only have been able to do so if they were famous enough to get elected. If John Stewart ran for president, it’s very unlikely he would lose. Even Taylor Swift would beat Trump or Vance; The Rock outpolls literally every candidate imaginable. I suspect so would Joe Rogan.
We sort of laugh this off. But it’s objectively true, and it means something has fundamentally changed in American voters. When Reagan ran (for California and then the country) he had the advantage of a long political career to establish his bona fides. Had it been Chuck Norris, I am pretty sure he’d have never won either seat. But today (if Norris were young enough to be plausible), I am pretty sure he’d have a shot. The only mitigating factor would be how well he sells it—which is again just another metric of fame. Can he stay famous enough to win after opening his mouth for six months together. It would not be “can he convince voters he has any relevant competency and can be trusted to do anything good at it,” but “can he convince voters he’s a groovy dude.”
At the level of influence, consider myself: there may be lots of competent historians and philosophers doing what I do, but few read or hear their stuff because they aren’t famous. I’m only microfamous, of course, but the accumulation of my “fame” (a.k.a. fans and reader-base) is what made my work visible, which in turn generated more fame, in a feedback loop. Many people ask me how they can make a living doing what I do, and I have to explain that I don’t think they can. The only way to do that is to have a large enough market to sustain you—which, yes, can be built on a reputation for quality and value, but there is no way to just “start” with one of those. You have to build it. And mine was built by a series of lucky accidents that can’t be replicated (the media-space is now too large and oversaturated to build attention the way I did). But even building a rep for quality is just another way of building “fame” in the sense Giles means; and it’s not as successful (hence why I am microfamous while crank intellectuals get megafamous). The same thing happens when people argue that Bart Ehrman is right and I’m wrong about something because he is “more famous” than me (he makes more money, holds a prestigious position, sells more books, etc.). The entire “Argument from Prestige” which poisons a lot of biblical studies today is a reflection of diasimocracy. “He who has a more prestigious publisher is more likely correct.” That’s diasimocracy. Because prestige is just another version of fame.
And when this creeps across the entirety of society, it simply becomes our de facto government. Even though “technically” we are a representative democracy, “actually” those with real power (those most people will actually listen to and do the bidding of and thus who will control politicians—or, eventually, become one) are the famous. They need not be famous for something trivial (an actor, a news reader, an influencer, an idle celebrity). They can be famous for something pertinent. Obama had built and Booker is building fame solely as a statesman; likewise Buttigieg, who didn’t have the fame in 2020 that he has built since. And his fame is partly built on his competence, but it’s still mostly built on his being good at selling and explaining it. He is a successful influencer. He just happens to also be really competent, but as the examples of Musk and RFK, Jr., and Trump and Hegseth and even Cruz or Green, prove, competence need not have anything to do with it. Buttigieg is competent. But that he still needs fame to get access to levers of power is why we are in a diasimocracy. That’s the distinction.
Giles delineates the problem like this:
Under the power of the corporate media, diasimocracy is a means of dominance and control that restricts information and who has access to it. The corporate media exploits the human vulnerability to be fooled by the bandwagon fallacy, and the rule by the media benefits not the common interest but the interests of the celebrities and the corporate gatekeepers.
The mass media is an information space ruled by celebrity. Those who try to get noticed in the mass media through merit are all but shut out. You can say that media corporations are motivated by money, as is the nature of corporate capitalism, but ask yourself what is driving the revenue that media corporations want to grab. That would be the rule by celebrities. The information space is a celebrity economy, and the corporations are simply exploiting that.
The same could be said of “non” corporate media (just look at YouTube economics). The monetization effect is the same. As Giles notes, this pressures influencers to “lie, cheat, and steal for a bit of fame without regard to truth, integrity, or who they harm.” The race for click-bait, controversy, pandering, hyperbolic headlines, speed over research, and skirting the truth with exaggeration and oversimplification, gets very close to the dark side; and by then it’s too easy to step on over—because there are mostly only rewards for doing so.
This is the same effect in politics: fame is the currency of political success; and fame has to be engineered or stoked, which entails great expense; which requires mega-rich investors; which is why corporations are in every politician’s pocket: the system simply requires them to be. But at the bottom of all this is the mere fact of fame as the currency. Buttigieg has prospects not because he is good at every pertinent job (he is). He has prospects because he is witty and well-spoken. Likewise AOC and Sanders. And Hegseth and Green. Yes, informed people see Hegseth and Green as incompetent jokes who have a permanent foot in their mouth. But that’s to confuse competence with fame. Their kind of stupid sells. It gets clicks and hurrahs. It gets them fame. That’s why Hegseth even has his job (he was literally a celebrity), and why Green keeps hers (she’s “popular,” in the market she needs to be: the 14th district of Georgia). That’s why we have crazy people running our government. It’s diasimocracy.
I think this is important to acknowledge. You (as I) may have long had thoughts in this direction, musing on the impertinent necessity, and inordinate utility, of “being famous” in any quest for power or influence. But Giles has given it a name and situated it in the framework of political philosophy. It’s not just some incidental oddity of modern life. It’s a genuine sea change in our entire de facto system of government. The U.S. Constitution does not say anything about fame deciding who gets to make legislation or sign executive orders or control top-level government functions, or even who gets to “be heard” in the marketplace of ideas and thus have any effect on it. Yet by strictly following U.S. Constitution, we have created exactly that system. I have tens of thousands of readers, which is a lot compared to the average person, and it gives me reach and influence the average person cannot easily attain; but that’s a pittance compared to who actually drives our national zeitgeist and thus policy—that’s reserved for those with millions of readers; and even they can be eclipsed in influence and power by those read or heard by tens of millions. And since people vote based on how they feel about you, not what’s true about you, it’s that “fame” that decides who has power.
And this ties into my earlier revelation That Luck Matters More Than Talent. Giles correctly diagnoses our system as a race toward mediocrity. But that’s also how I found our “free market” economic system. “Fame” matters more than talent is just another iteration of luck. But just as our “free market” system actually rewards the mediocre, not the talented (contrary to widespread belief that competition drives excellence, by itself it actually doesn’t), so does our constitutionally “free market” system of electing people to power. It starts with sources of information, which delude the public, who choose to follow “popular” information distributors rather than reliable ones, and thus act on false information and emotion when voting; and it ends with actual celebrities running everything, who are predominately mediocre at the actual jobs they thus get, people with no or minimal competence at legislating or running a department of government, much less the presidency. This is why almost all our leaders are so mediocre. It’s the same system as I diagnosed for the economy.
Even when people blame centrists for electing the milquetoast Biden over candidates more competent (and better for the country) like Warren or Sanders (or even Buttigieg), they are blaming diasimocracy. Yes, Sanders was very famous. But he wasn’t as famous. Sanders commands a passionate following—in a minority of the voting population (and not always for rationally commendable reasons). But Biden “appealed” to more voters, because he was “more familiar” to them, which is another way of saying “more popular,” which is another way of saying “more famous.” We don’t think of Biden in terms of being “a bigger celebrity” than Sanders because he’s boring and doesn’t appeal “as much” to Sanders fans; but he appeals enough to enough Sanders fans (obviously: they elected him) and also to non-Sanders fans (the mainstream centrists whose votes ultimately won Biden both the primary and presidency). Arithmetically, that’s “more famous.” A + B is always more than A. Hence fame does not mean simply “degree of enthusiasm,” but “the number of people who know and like or trust you.” Biden ruled the world’s only remaining superpower for four years for no other reason than that. And that’s what I believe Giles means by diasimocracy. It’s certainly what I mean by it.
So the conclusion here is not that we live in an explicitly constitutional “Rule of the Famous” (as if our Constitution read like the bylaws to American Idol, complete with singing contest), any more than anyone lives in an explicit “Rule of the Kleptocrats.” Pre-Putin Russia simply was a kleptocracy, by default of its actual operations, and not according to the Russian Constitution (which anyone who reads it can immediately recognize as absolute bullshit that barely describes any real thing about that nation’s government). And Russia is now an autocracy, yet still that’s not “written down” anywhere, least of all in its constitution (whose political value is less than toilet paper by now). Like Russia, which just evolved into an unofficial kleptocracy and thence an equally-unofficial autocracy, America has just “evolved” into a “de facto” system of government that is a diasimocracy. It, too, could evolve hence into an autocracy (given Trump’s contradictory messaging about a third term, and the Republican Party’s continuing efforts to dismantle our system of elections). But even if it doesn’t, I do not see any immediate path out of our nation simply trenching further into being a diasimocracy. I have no solutions or advice about that. But we do need to acknowledge it before we can come up with any.
