The recent announcement that former US President Donald Trump will be seeking re-election will put the media, their audiences, politicians and civil society to a test. The test is whether or not anyone has learned one of the most important lessons of the last six years, which is that when you turn politics into a ratings-fueled reality TV show, a reality TV star will end up as president.

Trump, despite his obvious genius for attention grabbing, didn’t happen in a vacuum. If media executives, journalists and news consumers had decided he wasn’t worth paying attention to, he wouldn’t have gotten anywhere close to power. Instead, starting in 2015, the US and international media made him their centerpiece. It doesn’t matter that the majority of coverage was negative; all it accomplished was to turn him into a culture war hero/villain, where in the binary political sphere of the US, gave him the credibility first to win the Republican primary and then the presidency. It also made giant media companies a lot of money.

Trump’s presidency and all the failures, corruption and threats associated with it, along with the prospect of its return, are therefore not just the result of the racism, sexism or media illiteracy of a certain segment of the American population, but also the result of the broader decline of the political culture of the US and other liberal democracies.

It is a political culture where increasingly emotional signaling, theatrics, manufactured controversy and issues unrelated to the material reality of average people are dominating the political discourse. It’s a total systemic failure of institutions to encourage and reward critical thinking. And this is an issue stemming not just from conservatives, but from across the political spectrum.

In Canada for example, we are increasingly seeing that politics can almost be reduced to how you feel about either Justin Trudeau, Pierre Poilievre, Jagmeet Singh or Elizabeth May. Instead of political divides being drawn over the nuances of policy or honest discussions of records, we essentially have two competing sport franchises, each with their diehard fans who will support their team regardless of how they are performing. Just watch Question Period in the House of Commons – supposedly an important moment of accountability in Canadian democracy – where there is typically an embarrassing exchange of talking points and questions are almost never answered.

The culture war, with its focus on niche issues that animate vocal minorities at the expense of the serious issues that require serious leadership, is already going strong in Canada, and it appears that it will only get worse.

Poilievre is adopting a media strategy of appealing directly to people’s emotions. For example, he recently released a video of himself in front of a homeless encampment in Vancouver saying that if we only waged a harder war on drugs, these problems could be solved, despite this being contrary to the observable failure of the last 50 years of waging a war on drugs.

Trudeau, for his part, has made one of his legislative centerpieces about increasing legal gun restrictions, a policy that in the United States would make a lot of sense, but in Canada, where we already have very strong gun laws, seems manufactured to win over scared suburbanites at the expense of alienating people who live in rural areas.

The spectacle of politics is nothing new, but the rise of Trump and his persistence highlights how dangerous it has become.

Ironically, through Trump we can see the answer. Just ignore him. The basis for his success is that he is a master at getting attention, so we should just stop giving it to him. Instead of investing our energy in something like the possibility of Trump being prosecuted (who doesn’t love a good crime drama), maybe we should focus on learning about policies that can actually address the problems our society faces, and research them in depth.

Beyond Trump, we need to demand more from politicians, the media and ourselves in terms of talking about real issues instead of focusing on the personalities and talking points.

To transcend the current moment, we all have to become a lot more serious, or government by reality TV stars will become the norm.

Brett Thoms