There’s this strain of thought out there that says our social media is messing with us in unique, never-before-seen ways. There’s also a counter-strain that says we’re not seeing anything all that new, that today’s disruption is lasting just as long as every other disruption.
I want to lean more towards the latter, but I do see some troubling trends.
For starters, I think the pace of shifts has increased to the point of them blending together. The printing press’ revolution lasted over 60 years. Pamphlets, newspapers, each had their heyday for decades. But radio only had a couple decades before television took over. Broadcast was shortly overtaken by cable. Then came email, the internet, blogs, social media.
Maybe it’s all already run out of steam. It’s already been a minute since we’ve seen the last big paradigm change. And maybe in hindsight we’ll decide that all of these formats can really just be thought of as part of a broader “internet age of media” whose primary feature was the variety of formats, but overall had a set of quite coherent effects: a tendency towards fragmentation, context collapse, enabling misinformation, trolling, and harassment, and so on.
But, for now, I think it’s premature for everyone to just keep declaring that we are in an unequivocally unprecedented age.
RE Last Monday’s Bulwark podcast: These Never-Trumpers made a big deal about how “both sides” are so extreme, or at least, that voters perceive them as extreme. I believe the term used was “either fascists or socialists”.
But here’s the thing. It’s not that both sides are getting fundamentally more extreme, although I have argued in the past that their programs are getting more extreme. The real problem is that the two-party system mobilizes otherwise reasonable pre-existing1 voters to support and enable fascists or socialists.
Related to that episode, I did begin to wonder: How do we even start to combat the “word salad” style of politics that well-under-way to taking over the GOP? It’s the stuff like this that I’m referring to: it doesn’t make the slightest lick of sense, and yet, it’s highly efficient at activating authoritarian-minded voters.
I almost want to say that we need to figure out a likewise-ly authoritarian way to activate those same voters, but I know this stuff doesn’t work like that. Plus, it’s, you know, immoral. But we still need something.
I’ve been reading Barack Obama’s latest book “A Promised Land”, and in it, he elucidates a very convincing case for acting on conviction rather than polls.
At the same time, Matt Yglesias makes a likewise convincing case for what he calls “popularism”: it’s not populism, in the sense of just doing whatever dumbass thing you think you can rally a mob to support, but rather the idea that whatever position is most popular is the easiest springboard to building an electoral coalition that can incorporate your particular personal wonkish goals.
I can’t yet say who has the best side of this debate. I don’t believe either is necessarily contradicting the other. I think that if you put them in a room together, they’d loosely agree that Matt’s prescription is one among many valid theories of change for accomplishing the goals that Obama would say conviction must dictate. But at the concrete level, they’d vehemently disagree with each other on what actual moves that this means should be taken in any given situation.
It’s pretty clear at this point that Trump wants to declare (for 2024); although, apparently his team stopped him from declaring last week because they don’t want him to own any potential midterm loss2. Which, OK, but…
What’s the over-under on him prematurely declaring anyways? We know he’s impatient and impulsive. So, give me your %, folks!
Is not prematurely declaring actually all that beneficial, knowing what we already do about his political fundamentals3? In other words, Trump may be an orange piece of shit4, but he’s a piece of shit who has thus far managed to parlay an insane stolen-election lie into a purge of his political party. I can easily imagine a universe where Trump extends this lie into the midterm, regardless of its outcome, and it helps build his case for a “stolen 2024” lie.
Just wondering, is there any bigger angle here? The pundits clearly have a (negative) opinion about declaring before midterms, but this is also clearly running up against our ever-lengthening presidential primary cycle. In fact, given the current levels of polarization, I’m not even all that sure that midterms are all that relevant anymore. I think the most we’ll be able to tell from this election is whether midterms are “stuck in a rut” — that is, that they’re going to continue on the current historical path of the president’s party losing — or whether we’ve “turned a corner” (IE the president’s party winning), which would signify that Biden’s agenda (and first-half-of-first-term agendas in general) is capable of flipping the outcome — or, even, that we may have a different, new historical driver emerging which is, again, capable of flipping the outcome.
Cheers, and happy Tuesday, folks!
Can’t emphasize this enough. These people don’t just come out of the woodwork like magic, as many “pendulum” or “backlash” theories essentially imply. No, they’re simply persuaded by the arguments of adjacent factions whom they’re already predisposed to listen to.
Take, for instance, my hardcore Trumper mom. She was never one of those idiots who show up at Trump rallies with crazy misspelled t-shirts and have fallen for Republican politics for the last several decades, hook-line-and-sinker. She’s not a Q-tip. But she was highly predisposed to accepting the Trump lines. And those lines were so radical that they were even rather attractive to her — simplifying things she’d been annoyed about for a long time, into something that could make her a toxic Trumpist.
Which is standard practice. They’d be committing political malpractice to not do everything in their power to stop him prematurely declaring.
IE the ongoing purge of the Republican Party.
Which is, of course, the worst kind. You ever have to pick your dog’s shit, and the orange ones are always the most “fragrant” and mushy? Yeah.