Until 2016, political consultants were widely seen as master manipulators, which never quite made sense to me. After all, if guys like Karl Rove and David Axelrod were such geniuses at propaganda, why could they never convince more than half of eligible voters to show up on Election Day?

Despite (or perhaps because of) the effort that goes into focus groups, press releases, and speechwriting, most Americans despise politicians. The main focus of any campaign is not to reverse this dynamic but to selectively enhance it, to kindle our fear and hatred of the opposition to the point that we’ll come up with our own reasons to support their candidate.

This is now obvious. Donald Trump did everything wrong during his campaign. He insulted the family of a fallen soldier, fired two campaign managers, and was caught on tape bragging about being a sexual predator. He was wildly disliked, not just among “coastal elites” but everywhere. Here’s a remarkable Associated Press report from April 2016:

Seven in 10 people, including close to half of Republican voters, have an unfavorable view of Trump. . . . It’s an opinion shared by majorities of men and women; young and old; conservatives, moderates and liberals; and whites, Hispanics and blacks — a devastatingly broad indictment of the billionaire businessman. Even in the South, a region where Trump has won GOP primaries decisively, close to 70 percent view him unfavorably. And among whites without a college education, one of Trump’s most loyal voting blocs, 55 percent have a negative opinion.

And yet Trump managed to win the presidency because, like an unskilled but dirty basketball team, he has a genius for bringing everyone around him — opponents, reporters, debate moderators — down to his grubby level.

Trump’s campaign was the logical culmination of a political culture that was already almost entirely based on demonizing the opposing candidate. Long ago, the American political class mastered the jujitsu of using the force of our dissatisfaction with the status quo against us by channeling it into the two status quo parties.

Long ago, the American political class mastered the jujitsu of using the force of our dissatisfaction with the status quo against us by channeling it into the two status quo parties.

It wasn’t an ideal arrangement — I’m sure our politicians would prefer to be loved than to be grudgingly tolerated — but it maintained stability while the 1 percent vacuumed up the national wealth, and that was good enough.

Each election, candidates would praise the courage and wisdom of the American people, but you could always feel the contempt they really had for us in the unbearably bad campaign materials.

A typical ad is about as subtle as a World War I propaganda poster: twenty seconds of creepy music and grainy black-and-white footage of the opponent, followed by a montage of the smiling candidate in the bright sunshine with family, soldiers, and the flag.

If corporate ad guys made a spot like this, it’d be dripping in hipster self-awareness — annoying, most likely, but at least acknowledging our intelligence: you know and we know that we are trying to sell you this Whopper, so let’s have some fun.

By contrast, the analysis that goes into most campaign ads is astonishingly primitive. Democratic consultant Carter Eskew, explaining the conventional wisdom about the initial wave of general election commercials in 2012, had this to say: “The first ads that are run are in many ways the most important because the mind is the most open and uncluttered at that point.”

Sigmund Freud created modern psychoanalysis over a hundred years ago, and since then, I don’t know anyone who isn’t a political hack describe the human brain as an empty vessel just waiting to be filled.

We assume that campaign ads are effective because more money is spent on them each election. But could it be that we only think they work because the people who tout their supreme effectiveness are the same folks who are paid to produce them and the media outlets paid to run them? As with most advertising, it’s hard to find definitive proof of their effectiveness, but here’s some anecdotal evidence: everybody hates them.

Imagine how much more fun campaign ads would be if they borrowed from the corporate world and adopted the old strategy of marketing weakness as a strength. In 2012, Mitt Romney could have embraced his reputation as an out-of-touch billionaire with a Polo-style ad featuring Mitt and a crew of gorgeous young blonde women and men on a yacht, frolicking in crisp white linen shirts and drinking gin and tonics.

Obama could have countered with a “most interesting man in the world”—style campaign, featuring him laughing with imams in Indonesia, dancing with the Masai in Kenya, and speaking to hundreds of thousands at the Brandenburg Gate in Germany. “I don’t often run for president, but when I do . . .”