When Did Going Viral Become More Important Than Actually Running A City?

Andy Burnham took office this year with Downing Street proudly proclaiming: “A hot new bombshell has entered the villa.” The proverbial villa was the highest seat in the United Kingdom, and this hottie inherited a pretty messy government. By some miracle, his approval ratings did not suffer even slightly. Political gravitas was seemingly a thing of the past.

This was not an accident, and it was not unique. Across the Atlantic, Zohran Mamdani turned a New York City Council campaign into a TikTok operation, responding directly to constituent video complaints, showing up at problems with a camera, and building a following that political analysts kept struggling to explain using their existing frameworks.

In South Africa, Helen Zille jumped into a pothole wearing a snorkel, ziplined over a sinkhole, and has taken up DJ’ing on the side. All in the name of relatability. Then there are the OG’s like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unedited videos from the Capitol floor and Kamala Harris’s Brat summer era.

The question that nobody in political science departments seems to be having loudly enough is this: are these politicians rewriting democratic accountability for a generation that grew up being advertised to since before they could read, or have we collectively handed the keys to governance to an algorithm that rewards puddle-jumping and cannot process a municipal budget deficit?