There’s a photograph of a SWAT team advancing down a suburban street that looks nearly identical to a war zone. You can’t tell if it’s Kabul or Kansas. Kevlar vests, automatic rifles, armored personnel carriers, all deployed for a suspected shoplifter or a welfare check gone wrong. On the surface, it’s absurd. But the image doesn’t register that way anymore. We’ve been taught to accept it.

There’s also a photograph of a billionaire, take your pick, standing on a TED Talk stage in a $600 hoodie and designer sneakers, unveiling a “vision” of the future that mainly involves us middle class folx working harder while they hoard more money. No one’s laughing.

These two images, militarized cop and tech mogul seem unrelated. But they represent twin evolutions of how American media has dressed power since the 1980s. One is the hard costume of force while the other is the soft costume of wealth. Both have been scrubbed clean of satire, ambiguity, and critique. What used to be questioned is now aestheticized and what used to be exposed is now aspirational.

There are parallels between the transformation of the police and the wealthy elite as portrayed through television shows, and that transformation reflects and reinforces more profound ideological shifts. From polyester uniforms and buffoon billionaires to full-body armor and untouchable oligarchs, the makeover has not only been visual, it’s been political.

In the 1980s, police officers on television were messy. Hill Street Blues introduced flawed, overworked cops navigating urban chaos with limited resources and emotional depth. Columbo, airing in reruns, featured a detective in a wrinkled trench coat solving murders through psychological insight, not brute force. These were not warriors; they were workers—civil servants, not combatants.

But starting in the Reagan era, American policing began to militarize, not only in practice but in image. The war on drugs, the rise of gang task forces, and the surplus distribution of military equipment to local departments all contributed to a new visual template. Shows like COPS and America’s Most Wanted launched in the late 1980s, painting the American city as a battleground and police officers as heroes in a never-ending war against criminality.

By the 2000s, post-9/11 security theater had cemented the transformation. Police became counterterrorist operatives. In 24, Jack Bauer tortures suspects to protect the homeland. In NCIS, federal agents move like Navy SEALs. In SWAT, Los Angeles officers use military tactics to “serve and protect” with armored trucks and drone surveillance.

The effect is ideological. It tells us danger is constant, violence is justified, and dissent is suspicious. It shifts the perception of policing from communal accountability to command and control. It erases the difference between soldier and civil servant.

The uniform changed from khakis and badges to black tactical gear, and so did the meaning. It’s no longer about serving the public but subduing it.

Now, rewind to how wealth was portrayed in the same time frame. In Columbo, the murderer was almost always rich. An art dealer, a surgeon, a television executive, someone with a vacation home and a secret. These characters were smug, polished, and guilty. The joy of the show was watching Columbo, disheveled and underestimated, unravel their facade.

Wealth was shown as decadent, bloated, and ultimately self-defeating. Think The Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan’s Island, or even Dallas, which despite glamorizing wealth, still portrayed the elite as corrupt, melodramatic, and emotionally bankrupt. The rich were dangerous, yes, but also ridiculous.

By contrast, today’s media rarely mocks the wealthy without mythologizing them. In Succession, the Roys are satirical, but their power is absolute. In Billions, The Morning Show, and House of Cards, billionaires and media executives are ruthless strategists who may be immoral but are rarely inept. Even in dystopian fiction like Elysium or Don’t Look Up, the ruling class is cartoonish only in cruelty, not competence.

The modern billionaire archetype is no longer a bloated oil baron or clueless aristocrat. It’s the tech visionary, the disruptor, the man (and it’s almost always a man) in the fleece zip-up who doesn’t care about politics because he believes he’s already beyond it. Even when shown as sociopathic, this figure is portrayed with a sheen of inevitability. He is the future.

What do these two trends share? A movement from human fallibility to hyper-competence. From the comic to the sublime. From something we could challenge to something we must endure and envy.

Both police and the wealthy have undergone a rebranding. The cop, once portrayed as a beleaguered civil servant, is now styled as a beleaguered special ops agent. Once skewered for their absurdity, the rich are now sanctified for their efficiency and visions of the future. These aren’t just character tropes; they are ideological tools. They tell us who deserves power and why. They define what kind of violence is acceptable and what kind of inequality is natural.

In both cases, the visual transformation serves a political function. The Kevlar vest and the cashmere hoodie say the same thing: this person is above you, and you can’t touch them.

This aesthetic shift also eliminates the middle. There is no “regular” anymore. No beat cop, no working millionaire. You are either a fully armored enforcer or an ultra-wealthy manipulator. Everyone else is the backdrop.

This has real-world consequences. When everyday citizens only see police in combat gear, they don’t see someone to talk to; they see someone to fear. When every portrayal of wealth suggests genius and inevitability, the system appears too sophisticated to critique and too strategic to fail.

We stop imagining alternatives. We stop laughing at them. And laughter is essential. Mockery is a form of power. When the rich were clowns, they were vulnerable. When cops were flawed, they were accountable. Now, both are bulletproof.

It’s tempting to say that the media merely reflects social reality. But the media also constructs it. The constant saturation of specific visuals—riot shields, biometric vaults, drone shots of private islands—normalizes inequality and state violence.

We’re trained to associate Competence with militarism, Legitimacy with wealth, Security with surveillance

We start to believe this is how the world should look. It becomes harder to imagine a society where police wear shirts instead of armor or where wealth isn’t synonymous with wisdom. The stories we consume become the limits of our political imagination.

These portrayals feed back into real life. The militarization of police accelerated in part because of 1033 program grants, but it was legitimized and glamorized by television. Wealth concentration exploded due to tax cuts and deregulation, but its cultural sanctification came from prestige TV.

As we absorb these images, we adjust our expectations. We accept billionaires as political actors. We accept police tanks on our streets. We accept surveillance as security and inequality as inevitable.

And we start to question not them but ourselves. So it’s time to make the costume strange again. The first step toward reclaiming critique is visual disobedience. We should see the police uniform not as armor but as overkill, the billionaire not as visionary but as a hoarder, and remember that every costume is a choice, and every choice carries ideology.

Media cannot save us, but it can train us to expect better. It can puncture the mythologies we’ve built around wealth and force. It can bring back satire, vulnerability, and doubt. It can remind us that the emperor wears fleece and that it’s still just clothes. Until then, we remain spectators in a performance of power, watching as Kevlar and Cashmere march across our screens, waiting for a punchline that will never come.