Nary a “philosopher king”: The long road from Plato to American politics - Louis René Beres

http://blog.oup.com/2011/08/philosopher-king/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+oupblog+%28OUPblog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

The story is told of an admiring friend who charms a young mother, “My, that’s a beautiful baby you have there.”  The mother replies, “Oh, that’s nothing — you should see his photograph.”  In this obviously weird colloquy lies a sorely bitter truth.
Routinely, in all politics, we Americans are presented not with authentic individuals, but with choreographed reproductions. Inevitably, to our chagrin, we discover that these carefully touched up images disguise a multitude of virulent pathologies. In a stunning, if unwitting, misunderstanding of Plato’s thought, which explicitly emphasizes the core reality of ideas, most Americans now fully accept this very odd substitution of image for reality.

Maybe summed up best by a marketing axiom: Republicans want authenticity and little else, Democrats want optimism. Either can be faked and manipulated more easily than just about any other product feature, especially when all the actual features are flawed or don't work as promised.