“And the Voice said to me: 'We're not talking about eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth. We're talking about impermanent, transient, human truth. I don't expect you people to be capable of truth, but god-dammit, at least you're capable of self-preservation!' And I said, 'Why me?' And the Voice said: 'Because you're on television, dummy!’”

Paddy Chayefsky, Network

I do not believe is single causes for historical events.  One can always find multiple reasons why events occurred, and of these some will be dominant, some will be material, and some will be trivial.

The words repeated above tell us something at least material about the reason for the result of the 2016 presidential election.  Demagoguery is in part a function of personality: many successful politicians have a charismatic nature that makes others will to pay attention to them and follow their lead. It well may be that the reaction to this charismatic nature is why the opposition to such politicians is also visceral and shrill.

When you take the demagogue out of the local hustings and place him (or her) on the larger stage access through the media to a larger population becomes an important ingredient. (Illustrating this phenomenon as depicted in popular culture, consider not only Network but also A Face in the Crowd.)

The recent conclave at Harvard of campaign “professionals” to give a collective post-mortem of the presidential election produced a fascinating observation. The participants were asked when they realized that the Donald might win the nomination and the election, and, according to the reports, they observed that his ratings and popularity did not suffer from his misstatements or missteps, which, they assumed, would have sunk the campaign chances of any other mere mortal.

I may be incapable to explaining why the president-elect has this effect upon people.  I find him and his politics unattractive.  But it is a fact that he has been a prominent feature in mass popular entertainment, and perhaps that is were a lot of the electorate formed their fundamental opinion of him, which made them willing to accept his word.

In any event, the Donald has become our new Teflon Don.