Jerry Springer, American Ringmaster

Springer’s success at giving people what they wanted, not what they wanted to believe they should want, was imitated beyond TV. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. America’s populace can be its most powerful force and its most terrifying danger. You can find evidence of this in political-science texts or op-ed pages or histories of the Andrew Jackson administration. Or you could have watched cultural populism play out on “The Jerry Springer Show,” weekdays from 1991 to 2018....