No. of Recommendations: 2
The Iran deal and the selling of Obamacare - where the average American gets WORSE health care coverage and yet manages to pay more for it - were the proving grounds:
What the White House understood, and which I came to understand through my reporting on the Iran deal, was that social media—which was now the larger context in which former prestige “legacy” outlets like The New York Times and NBC News now operated—could now be understood and also made to function as a gigantic automated permission structure machine. Which is to say that, with enough money, operatives could create and operationalize mutually reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc that would short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis, and lead unwary actors and audience members alike to believe that things that had never believed or even heard of before were in fact not only plausible, but already widely accepted within their specific peer groups.
And things were looking good for them:
Once Joe Biden was safely installed in the White House, Obama’s Democratic Party could look forward to smooth sailing—protected by new election laws, the party’s control over major information platforms, the FBI, and the White House, and a government-led campaign of lawfare against Trump. It was hard to see how the party could lose for at least another generation, if ever again.
