A funny thing happened on the way to general collapse of America's ability to support creative artists. Reviewers stopped reviewing according to criteria of quality and stopped trying to imagine standards of eternal value. (Yep, doesn't that sound stodgy and conservative?) Instead, reviews of art "products" reflect the scale of market preference - usually scored by Internet clicks, Likes, etc. These preferences are shaped by the money invested in PR and hype, so people who are already celebrities or people who have the money to buy PR accumulate the clicks: suddenly their book/movie/song is the most popular, so it must be the "best". The crowd has deemed it so!
Meanwhile, the humanities teachers who tried to establish a canon usually did so from a white-privileged position and fell afoul of so many challenges, that they abandoned their responsibilities and cultural leaders all together and simply bemoan "everything is relative these days!". So who can blame the general public when they don't rally around the cause of supporting Humanities departments or cultural institutions like the NEA when even the teachers are saying that there are no criteria if we can't have white criteria, and we should throw out all this useless Liberal Arts education in favor of narrow employment training.
Now we get to the candidates. Hillary is the most marketable. She has the PR department behind her. She has the clickbait. Therefore she's the "best". Wow, talk about giving America the President we deserve.
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to the Bezos-owned WaPo Release 2.0. 
