There are a few things I'd change if I were writing this today. The big one is that, between the pandemic and mail-in ballots, Straussian ideas and tactics were about cause massive loss of life and threaten democracy.
The rest I'm comfortable letting stand.
We have reached a point in the show which always makes the fans a little
nervous. we have decided that one of our oldest and biggest storylines
is starting to come to a natural conclusion so we need to begin wrapping
up the loose ends and introducing the next one.
For years now,
when it came to politics, the big recurring story was what you might
call the wages of Strauss. we pushed the we pushed the idea that either
the main cause or the essential context of almost every major political
development over the past couple of decades came from the conservative
movements relatively public conclusion that their agenda, while it might
hold its own for a while and perhaps even surge ahead now and then, was
destined to lose the battle of public opinion in the long run.
This
left them with two choices, either modify their ideas so that they
could win over the majority of the public, or undermine the Democratic
process through a Straussian model, an approach based on controlling
most of the money and increasing the influence that could be bought with
that money, changing government so that an ever smaller part of the
population had an ever-larger role in governing the country and creating
a sophisticated three-tiered information management system where
trusted sources of information were underfunded and undermined, the
mainstream press was kept in line through a combination of message
discipline and incentives with special emphasis placed on working the
refs, and the creation of a special media bubble for the base which used
spin, propaganda, and outright disinformation to keep the canon fodder
angry, frightened, and loyal.
For a long time this approach
worked remarkably well, but you could argue that the signs of
instability were there from the beginning, particularly the difficulty
of controlling the creation and flow of disinformation, the
vulnerability to what you might call hostile take over, and the way the
system lent itself to cults of personality.
We've had a good run
with this storyline for a long time now, but it seems to be coming to a
resolution and it has definitely lost a great deal of its novelty. (Lots
of people are making these points now.)
The next big story, but
one which we believe will dominate American politics for at least the
next decade or so will be how the Republican party deals with the
unwinding of the Trump cult of personality. Dismantling such a cult is
tremendously difficult under the best of circumstances where the leader
can be eased out gently, but you have with Donald Trump someone who has
no loyalty to the party whatsoever and who is temperamentally not only
capable but inclined to tear the house down should he feel betrayed.
If
Trump continues to grow more erratic and public disapproval and support
for his removal continues to grow, then association will be
increasingly damaging to Republicans in office. However, for those same
politicians, at least those who come up for election in the next two to
four years, it is not at all clear that any could survive if the Trump
loyalists turned on them.
But this goes beyond individual
candidates. Trump's hold on the core of the base is so strong and so
personal that, if he were to tell them directly that the GOP had
betrayed both him and them, they would almost certainly side with him.
They might form a third party, or simply boycott if you elections, or,
yes, even consider voting for Democrats.. I know that last one sounds
unlikely but it is within the realm of possibility if the intraparty
civil war got bitter enough.
Obviously, if Trump survives this
scandal and is reelected in 2020, all of this is moot, but if not, then
how things break will be a story we’ll be glad to have been following.
