Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy❤
No. of Recommendations: 2
A great read from Tablet:
The setup, from HotAir:
This is such an interesting and thought provoking article. It's kind of a grand unified theory of woke culture. As author David Samuels explains it, woke culture may have gestated in the fever swamps of leftist academia but it came to dominate our national discussion and overtook the political structures we'd all grown up learning about in school because its methods were useful to certain progressive politicians, especially Barack Obama. (
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2024/12/19/tablet-how-...)
The article itself:
https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/rapid-onset-poli...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. How it worked:
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 [Obama] 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.
Obama was nothing if not a serious student of American progressive thought, leveraging ideas from the 1920's to forward his plans. I've long wondered why a fiction writer like Ben Rhodes could become a National Security advisor; this framing explains that.
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.
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.
In other words, it's no secret how the media always fell into lockstep to an amazingly consistent degree on every story that the left needed promoted.
Catchphrases like “defund the police,” “structural racism,” “white privilege,” “children don’t belong in cages,” “assigned gender” or “stop the genocide in Gaza” would emerge and marinate in meme-generating pools like the academy or activist organizations, and then jump the fence—or be fed—into niche groups and threads on Twitter or Reddit. If they gained traction in those spaces, they would be adopted by constituencies and players higher up in the Democratic Party hierarchy, who used their control of larger messaging verticals on social media platforms to advance or suppress stories around these topics and phrases, and who would then treat these formerly fringe positions as public markers for what all “decent people” must universally believe; those who objected or stood in the way were portrayed as troglodytes and bigots. From there, causes could be messaged into reality by state and federal bureaucrats, NGOs, and large corporations, who flew banners, put signs on their bathrooms, gave new days off from work, and brought in freshly minted consultants to provide “trainings” for workers—all without any kind of formal legislative process or vote or backing by any significant number of voters.
Amazing how much power this had...
I've often felt that Barack Obama's true idol was Woodrow Wilson as both had the same sneering contempt for the countrymen they ruled over. Turns out he may have been worse.
No. of Recommendations: 3
The real genius behind all of this was David Axelrod:
Permission structures, a term taken from advertising, was Axelrod’s secret sauce, the organizing concept by which he strategized campaigns for his clients. Where most consultants built their campaigns around sets of positive and negative ads that promoted the positive qualities of their clients and highlighted unfavorable aspects of their opponents’ characters and records, Axelrod’s unique area of specialization required a more specific set of tools. To succeed, Axelrod needed to convince white voters to overcome their existing prejudices and vote for candidates whom they might define as “soft on crime” or “lacking competence.”
...
In other words, while most political consultants worked to make their guy look good or the other guy look bad by appealing to voters’ existing values, Axelrod’s strategy required convincing voters to act against their own prior beliefs. In fact, it required replacing those beliefs, by appealing to “the type of person” that voters wanted to be in the eyes of others.
left wingers are particularly affected by their social structures and peer pressure; just look around any blue neighborhood and count the number of "In this house we believe" signs that collective affirm all the progressive catechisms they're required to chant on demand.
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.
No. of Recommendations: 2
So what happened?
Musk bought Twitter.
Trump turned his head at the right time.
Netanyahu decided to act on his own.
The culmination of those three things broke the information monopoly, provided focus for a counter campaign, and showed that the vision of Obama for the Middle East was a complete farce.
arallel to the collapse of the new regional order that Obama decreed for the Middle East has been the collapse of the Obama-led domestic order at home. The coincidence marks the end of Obama’s pretensions to be a new kind of world leader, running a new world order of his own making from his iPhone, grounded in his own strange combination of nihilism and virtue-mongering.
In fact, it can be argued that there is no coincidence here at all, since the division between Obama’s program abroad and his role at home is largely artificial. At its core, Obama’s Iran deal was an attempt to remake the Democratic Party in his own image, by establishing fealty to the ayatollahs as a litmus test for the party faithful—thereby elevating third-worldist “progressive” POC elements within the party at the expense of Jews, who undermined the premises of DEI ideology by doing well on standardized tests and making money and who were annoyingly loyal to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Obama’s rivals for control of the party. Conversely, the recent disintegration of Obama’s world-building project in Middle East has helped to further collapse his mystique, by showing that his grand vision for America’s role in the world was founded on sand. If Obama the global strategist is clearly a failure, and his hand-picked successors at home were a senile old man and a babbling idiot, then the country’s corporate elite and tech oligarchy might rightly question the wisdom of continued payoffs to Obama’s Chicago-style Democratic machine and make peace with Donald Trump instead. Which they did.
To my rightie friends, this is a long article, but well, well, worth your time.
No. of Recommendations: 2
But he's still the first black politician to be "clean and articulate" isn't he? According TO DEMOCRATS.
I wonder if Democrats, out of Wokeness will buy soap and speaking lessons for black politicians in their party?
No. of Recommendations: 1
left wingers are particularly affected by their social structures and peer pressure; just look around any blue neighborhood and count the number of "In this house we believe" signs that collective affirm all the progressive catechisms they're required to chant on demand.
****
Yep.
Trust me, I am surrounded by many of such signs and bumper stickers. And they - are so exclusionary and snobby.
