Posted on 12/21/2024 6:19:10 AM PST by MtnClimber
If anyone in the future cares enough to write an authentic history of the 2024 presidential campaign, they might begin by noting that American politics exists downstream of American culture, which is a deep and broad river. Like any river, American culture follows a particular path, which has been reconfigured at key moments by new technologies. In turn, these technologies, which redefine both space and time—canals and lakes, the postal system, the telegraph, railroads, radio and later television, the internet, and most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms—set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves.
Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.
The time was ripe, in other words, for a cultural revolution—which would, according to the established patterns of American history, in turn generate a political one.
I first became interested in the role of digital technology in reshaping American politics a decade ago, when I reported on the selling of Barack Obama’s Iran deal for The New York Times Magazine. By the time I became interested in the subject, the outcome of Obama’s campaign to sell the deal, which had become the policy cornerstone of his second term in office, was a fait accompli. The Deal seemed odd to me, not only because American Jews were historically a key player in the Democratic Party—providing outsized numbers of voters, party organizers and publicists, in addition to huge tranches of funding for its campaigns—but because the Deal seemed to actively undermine the core assumptions of U.S. security architecture in the Middle East, whose goals were to ensure the steady flow of Middle Eastern oil to global markets while keeping U.S. troops out of the region. A Middle East in which the U.S. actively “balanced” a revisionist anti-American power like Iran against traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel seemed guaranteed to become a more volatile region that would require exactly the kinds of active U.S. military intervention that Obama claimed to want to avoid. Nor did turning over major shipping lanes to Iran and its network of regional terror armies seem like a recipe for the steady flow of oil to global markets that in turn helped ensure the ability of U.S. trading partners in Europe and Asia to continue to buy U.S.-made goods. Seen through the lens of conventional American geopolitics, the Iran deal made little sense.
In the course of my reporting, though, I began to see Obama’s plans for the Middle East not simply as a geopolitical maneuver, but as a device to remake the Democratic Party—which it would do in part by rewiring the machinery that produced what a brilliant young political theorist named Walter Lippmann once identified, in his 1921 book, as “public opinion.”
Lippmann was a progressive Harvard-educated technocrat who believed in engineering society from the top down, and who understood the role of elites in engineering social change to be both positive and inevitable. It was Lippman, not Noam Chomsky, who coined the phrase “manufacturing consent,” and in doing so created the framework in which the American governing class would understand both its larger social role and the particular tools at its disposal. “We are told about the world before we see it,” Lippmann wrote. “We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.” Or as he put it even more succinctly: “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.”
The collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid on which Lippmann’s assumptions rested, and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy—and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices—in new ways. In fact, as Obama’s chief speechwriter and national security aide Ben Rhodes, a fiction writer by vocation, argued to me more than once in our conversations, the collapse of the world of print left Obama with little choice but to forge a new reality online.
When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.
To my mind, the point of the story I was reporting, in addition to being an interesting exploration of how the tools of fiction writing could be applied to political messaging on social media as an element of statecraft, was twofold. First, it usefully warned of the potential distance between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged and managed from the White House, which suggested a new potential for a large-scale disaster like the war in Iraq, which I—like Rhodes and Obama—had opposed from its beginning.
Second, I wanted to show how the new messaging machinery actually operated—my theory being that it was probably a bad idea to allow young White House aides with MFA degrees to create “public opinion” from their iPhones and laptops, and to then present the results of that process as something akin to the outcome of the familiar 20th-century processes of reporting and analysis that had been entrusted to the so-called “fourth estate,” a set of institutions that was in the process of becoming captive to political verticals, which were in turn largely controlled by corporate interests like large pharmaceutical companies and weapons-makers. Hillary Clinton would soon inherit the machinery that Obama and his aides had built along with the keys to the White House. What would she do with it?
What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled.
During the Trump years, Obama used the tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power center for himself, one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party that he succeeded in refashioning in his own image—and which, after Hillary’s loss, had officially supplanted the “centrist” Clinton neoliberal machine of the 1990s. The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP’s own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like “POC,” “MENA,” and “Latinx,” whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party’s new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party’s efforts at social transformation.....SNIP
Social media and leftist government censorship to shape public opinion. But now the censorship is being ripped away from the democRAT’s control. And they are in a panic.
....and Like Lemmings they seem to head
Straight for the cliff with a
Raging Ocean far below.
do you think Obama paints his toes?
He lost me the minute he started in with America is a democracy.
So. Communists, censorship, and propaganda.
Everything anyone with the ability to think, could see and understand.
I think Big Mike the Pike paints them for him.
fire engine red to match is lip stick
mike needs something to shoot for
first black president
really, a sissy marxist POS?
that’s the best you could do black?
i love all americans and I’m trying not to see color, but stop making me
head shake
long read, done first section. Considering pedigree and connections of author, I am looking to be gaslighted, but so far, pretty darn good:”It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power. But control over digital platforms, and what appeared on those platforms, was a key element in signaling and exercising that power. The Hunter Biden laptop story, in which party operatives shanghaied 51 former high U.S. government intelligence and security officials to sign a letter that all but declared the laptop to be a fake, and part of a Russian disinformation plot—when most of those officials had very strong reasons to know or believe that the laptop and its contents were real—showed how the system worked. That letter was then used as the basis for restricting and banning factual reports about the laptop and its contents from digital platforms, with the implication that allowing readers to access those reports might be the basis for a future accusation of a crime. None of this censorship was official, of course: Trump was in the White House, not Obama or Biden. What that demonstrated was that the real power, including the power to control functions of the state, lay elsewhere.
A long, thoughtful, and detailed essay.
I agree with most of it, but Samuels is unwilling to acknowledge how much the old media controlled the political environment before the digital age.
wow , so good, great section on Axelrod includes:”With Obama’s reelection campaign on the horizon in 2012, the White House’s attention turned to selling Obamacare, which would become the signature initiative of the president’s first term in office. Without a healthy, well-functioning press corps that could command the attention and allegiance of voters, the White House would have to manufacture its own world of validators to sell the president’s plan on social media—which it successfully did. The White House sales effort successfully disguised the fact that the new health care program was in fact a new social welfare program that would lower rather than raise the standard of care for most Americans with preexisting health insurance, while providing tens of billions of dollars in guaranteed payments to large pharmaceutical companies and pushing those costs onto employers. Americans would continue to pay more for health care than citizens of any other first world country, while receiving less.”
On the bright side, half of the country was never fooled by Obama for one minute. He only managed to hypnotize those open to suggestion. Rush had a lot to do with that. He was quite the counter weight.
Their arrogance has no bounds. We could all see it, did they really think we didn’t? Then Elon comes along and buys Twitter and it’s as though the end of the world was happening. Maybe we didn’t understand the depths to which media and social media were being controlled by the government but it was exposed by the panic we witnessed before Elon even walked in the door.
Almost nobody is watching cable news anymore. They’re watching the free press exercised by individual citizens, of which they have no control. The same is going on across Europe, except those citizens don’t have the protection of our Constitution and it shows. People being imprisoned due to exposing the corruption and the corrupt abusing their authority to retaliate against those speaking out.
It isn’t going to end well. Even here, if we think the machine is dismantled because Trump has been voted in and Elon will dismantle that which is bloat, we are kidding ourselves. The machine is still in place and is going to fight to the death to continue to exist.
While the 2020’s have been a complete disaster so far it’s about to get much worse imho. They would rather tear everything down and leave chaos for Trump rather than see him, or the American people, succeed. It’s power and money for them...or nothing for anyone. They are traitors to the American spirit and its people.
Believe me, there is not and never WAS any ‘thought’ associated with “O’Bozo”... !
It is/was always and EVER only about emotion. His voter base would not (and many not even now), have anything whatsoever to do with ‘thought’.
Any group which can be successfully appealed to or persuaded on the basis of race or gender can not be considered thoughtful voters, and their decisions can hold no more merit that what can be expected from children or the mentally challenged
Children and the mentally challenged make decisions strictly on the basis of 'What I want', and 'What I feel'
No such conclusion, decision or view can have value if based on such a narrow , subjective and emotional basis.
“... has been reconfigured at by new technologies. In turn, these technologies - the telegraph, railroads, radio and later television, the internet, and most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms — set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves”
That passage, which I have shortened, caught my attention. The rest of the article is a word fog on other subjects.
American exceptionalism as the saving grace
Obama like the a great Oz was just the man behind the curtain who with his cabal in the West Wing ran the country with Biden as a senile sock puppet. The policies and decisions made during Obama’s de facto third term were a disaster for the country. The collapse of the Obama third term was the inexplicable decision to allow Biden to run for re-election ending in the disastrous first debate when Biden’s senility could no longer be concealed. The hasty decision to anoint Harris as the nominee without benefit of primaries or even an open convention was a grave mistake that lead to Trump’s ultimate victory. All efforts to destroy Trump with phony lawsuits only solidified Trumps support. The real clincher for Trumps triumphant return was his narrowly escaping an assassination in Butler, PA where the iconic image of a bleeding Trump with his fist in the air urging his supporters to fight on shaped public opinion in a way not seen since the famous photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima.
Obama has left the Democratic Party in shambles without any leadership. Nancy Pelosi will after her hip fracture will not be minority leader for long and Chuck Schumer too will soon be replaced. Obama would be smart to just enjoy his millions in his Martha’s Vineyard mansion as his plans for a fundamental transformation of America have ended.
T’was not social media killed the beast. T’was gas pumps and cash registers.
Negroes can break an anvil, don’t make it any harder than it is.
When Trump arose after the near-fatal headshot, he shouted from his heart “Fight! Fight! Fight!” I’ve taken the first fight to be for the election. The second fight is the transition. The third fight will be when he’s President.
We are not fight to win decisions. We are fighting to permanently eradicate the so-called “Democratic Party”, it’s ideology, and all leftists, socialists, communists, and marxists. It’s a war of TRUTH vs lies, good vs evil, decency vs perversion.
We even have to fight doubt and this who say and believe it can’t be don’t. It can. We will fundamentally restore America.
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