Life & Wisdom Quote by Joe Eszterhas

“Politics has become entertainment” lands like a complaint, but it’s also a confession from Joe Eszterhas: the screenwriter who helped make scandal slick, sex saleable, and outrage legible in two hours. Coming from a Hollywood writer, the line isn’t an outsider’s sneer at the circus; it’s an insider’s recognition that the circus has adopted his industry’s tools.

The intent is diagnostic, even self-incriminating. Eszterhas is pointing to a shift in political incentives: policy competence matters less than storyline, casting, and cliffhangers. Candidates aren’t just advocates; they’re protagonists engineered for camera angles, punch lines, and meme-ready conflict. The subtext is uglier than “people are distracted.” It’s that politics is now formatted to be consumed the way we consume pop culture: as identity reinforcement and weekly drama, with villains, redemption arcs, and merchandise. If entertainment runs on attention, politics increasingly runs on the same currency, rewarding the loudest performance over the most durable governance.

Context matters here. Eszterhas came up in the era when cable news metastasized and celebrity culture fused with public life, long before social media turbocharged it. His career sits at the hinge between old mass media and the modern attention economy: the moment when a televised spectacle could decide what the nation argued about at breakfast. The line works because it frames a power swap: the medium isn’t just carrying politics; it’s rewriting what politics is for.