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That was the advent of social media: elites could no longer gatekeep the masses. In previous eras media elites controlled both context and expression so that the political elite could pretend to have a popular mandate (because that is the basis of legitimacy in a democracy). Even in the so called golden era of democratic norms it could only exist because it was tightly controlled.
The masses were never wise, temperate, or well-informed. The current failsons of the western world came into power naively believing in their own liberal rhetoric: and thus, they have no defense against the crudity of the people they ostensibly lead. They can't even muster a defense without twisting themselves into knots as Hanania does, trying to bring forth the nanoangstrom of difference between bad populism and good democracy.
The truth is cold and unforgiven. There never was such a thing.
This doesn't seem true to me. Social media rose in the 2005-2010 era, which predates the 2014-2016 mark by up to a decade.
More damningly, social media rose all throughout the first world, but it was really only the Anglosphere (mostly the US, to some extent the UK) that went insane during this time period. The rest of the first world remained relatively tranquil until quite recently, even Germany which had a lot of challenges around the 2015 era.
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This is correct, but going further, social media rewired the masses. Low-information voters in the era of analog media possessed incumbency bias. Low-information voters in the era of digital media now have anti-incumbency bias.
In the 20th Century, the list of incumbent presidents that lost the White House is: Taft (faced a third-party run from Roosevelt that split the Republican vote), Hoover (the Great Depression), Carter (stagflation and the Iran Hostage Crisis), Bush the Elder (significant third-party run from Perot). Now we've gone back-to-back in incumbent losses while third-party candidates garnered nowhere near Roosevelt or Perot's support.
Social media stumbled into boosting negative content. They weren't optimizing for it, but rage bait travels faster and farther than other kinds of content, and as they were opting for engagement above all else, their algorithms boosted rage bait. There are certainly echo chambers, but still that rage gets directed at whomever is in power.
Martin Gurri's 2018 book The Revolt of the Public tracked this through events like the Arab Spring, arguing that the center can't hold, and whomever replaces an incumbent becomes the new center, which still can't hold. The Financial Times picked up on the gist in looking at how most incumbent parties in Europe, regardless of if they were right or left, lost in 2024.
I can think of another reason besides social media that Trump 45 lost. (And I don't mean electoral chicanery either)
Telling his voters not to vote by mail.
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It's certainly not mono-causal. The point is the low-information voter, and not just in America, now has anti-incumbency bias.
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Is it the ill-informed masses being driven insane by social media or the educated elites themselves?
I'd argue that media gatekeeping affected the informed policymaking class a lot more than the masses who never read, say, National Review. Speaking of gatekeeping, how many prominent political media figures aren't posting heavily on Twitter or some equivalent? Same goes for policy wonks.
This is an important distinction because it isn't mostly high-school educated voters who make policy, but the college educated, and most of those have graduate degrees. If the highly educated are just as prone to making bad decisions due to confirmation bias and/or falling victim to social-media driven stupidity, or are flat out uninformed, that's it's own problem, but these people aren't exactly "low information".
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The masses were, however, docile. People didn’t vote for extremists. Only a radical fringe opposed ongoing foreign policy commitments. There was more domestic terrorism than today, but normies didn’t have anything to do with that.
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