I wonder if there's any movie that exposes the essentially loathsome character of the democratic process as well as Our Brand Is Crisis, which details the efforts of notorious asshole James Carville's consultancy group to elect Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada president of Bolivia. This is the apotheosis of politics-as-theater; any higher value or sense of purpose in the process has been completely evacuated, leaving behind only the ugly science of puppetmastery.

After a few episodes, Morgan "Supersize Me" Spurlock's reality show 30 Days starts to have a similarly disheartening effect. Here the focus is not on the manipulator of the masses but on the masses themselves; Spurlock finds the most closed-minded, uncritical individuals he can possibly find and puts them in a new social context for thirty days, thereby challenging their preconceptions about the world for what is apparently the very first time in their entire lives. It's not a bad show—quite the opposite, it's often quite engaging, particularly in the four episodes that aren't explicitly about biogtry—it's just hard to understand how basic human empathy and/or common sense can be in such disastrously short supply.