From Tablet Mag:
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.
Note: Tabletmag does lean “conservative”. So… trigger warning, I guess. “Contains Conservative Thoughts”.Report
Conservative thoughts? That’s got to be the harshest thing anyone has said about conservatives on this site in ages Jaybird. Well done.
The headline of this article, note, is “How Barack Obama Build an Omnipotent Thought-Machine and how it was destroyed” and I think that summarizes the tone and thought quality of the article well.Report
That is the subhed on the post!
I thought that the article was good enough to read anyway.Report
It got me to laugh a lot so it had some merit!Report
Tablet started off as an interesting Jewish online magazine whose politics reflected standard American Jewish politics. The editors eventually started leaning right but also knew the politics of most American Jews so controlled themselves. It looks like they decided to go full into the far right edge of American Jews.Report
Thank you for confirming my suspicions because I have, over the years, read a number of Tablet articles (one about the politics of ultra orthodox public schooling funding in NY; another about the rabbinical background thought on biblical Noah) that were informative, thoughtful and deeply researched so this one really surprised me.Report
Far right edge?
You didn’t accuse them of being “wrong” but of being “far right”. But, you clarified, not, like, a general far right, but far right for American Jews.
Which confuses the issue even more.Report
In a similar vein, Twilight of the Liberal Left is a good read.
How will the Democrats rebuild in the face of a loss of this magnitude?
I suppose my money should remain on “Denial”…Report
ComeOnMan.gif
“Trump’s head turn was a perfect example of an event that has no explanation outside the favor of the gods, or whatever modern equivalent involving wind factors and directional probabilities you might prefer to the word “God.” Trump was fated to win, just as Achilles was fated to overcome Hector, because the gods, or if you prefer the forces of cosmic randomness, were on his side, on that day, at that moment. That move not only saved his life by allowing him to escape an assassin’s bullet; it revitalized his chi and set in motion a series of subsequent events that generated a reordering of the entire world.”Report
There’s a handful of people who are just lucky, I guess.Report