Back before Al Gore, peace be upon him, gave us the internet, I maintained quite a few magazine subscriptions. National Review, The New Republic and The Atlantic were on my list from the time I was a teenager. I would cycle in others like Harper’s, The New York Review of Books and even Granta and Ploughshares. I spent many a night drinking at the pub where the later was founded.

Now, I have exactly zero subscriptions. I take what I can get on-line and there’s so much on-line I see no reason to pay for it. The fact that I can, with a few clicks, catch up on the news in Borneo or check in on the doings of Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow and his fight against hooliganism is truly a miracle. Educated men of a century ago would be gobsmacked by the amount of detailed information I can include a single blog post.

There’s a downside to this wonderfulness. In the olden thymes, my subscription meant something to the people running those magazines. They needed it to pay their writers, so it was important to the writers as well. Today, these publications have no reason to care about me or my opinion of them. They just need to generate enough traffic to show their donors, who don’t care about me either.

In other words, as the financial relationship has changed, the intellectual relationship has changed. These publications are now on-line and they don’t have a direct financial link to their readers. Instead, they depend on wealthy donors and support from the massive nonprofit establishment. The result is an operation like National Review went from appealing to readers to lecturing them.

A similar thing has happened with TV news. In the olden thymes, the three networks were certainly preachy and biased, but they also had to get viewers and that meant keeping it between the ditches. The batshit insanity of a MSNBC would never be permitted. Those fruitcakes were relegated to local access and shortwave because no one could afford to indulge them.

That all changed with cable. MSNBC gets $0.70 per cable household per month, whether anyone watches or not and is overwhelmingly not. That means they collect $70 million per month even though no one watches. Fox, CNN, ESPN et al have similar or better deals. When you get a billion dollars for just showing up, you can indulge in just about any sort of reckless behavior you want, even letting mentally unstable lesbians host a primetime show.

The cable rackets have had another impact. They rely on writers and bloggers out of the Commentary Industrial Complex. Fox hires boys and girls from National Review and The Weekly Standard to be guest on shows. MSNBC hauls in people from progressive publications. PBS uses the NY Times and Washington Post as their farm system.

Put it all together and we now have a mass media that is not only unresponsive to its viewership and readership, but also openly hostile. The old periodicals that used to peddle ideas and culture to the public now lecture the public on behalf of the managerial class. The low-brow mass media of television can now indulge all of the excesses of progressive fanatics, making sport of anything and everything normal people find useful.

The worst part of this is that unplugging and dropping out has no impact. Until tens of millions of households unplug from cable TV, these media operations are immune to public discontent. Cord cutting will have some impact, but most people will never take that step. The massive nonprofit industry will keep on financing the news and opinion operations. Rich guys like Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos will backstop big news sites.

The North Koreans are fond of installing loudspeakers in villages to blast propaganda to the masses. In America, they install them in your living room and your pocket. The communications revolution was supposed to threaten the media monopoly of the prior age. Instead, it has created a special force, shock troops, who man the megaphones on behalf of the managerial class.

I suspect that much of what’s going on in the Republican primary is due to a realization that the people on talk radio, Fox News and your favorite news site are not playing it straight. Not so long ago they were explaining why you had to hold your nose and support Romney, because winning was too important for principles. Today, they are saying principles are too important to vote Trump, even though he is looking like a winner.

One of the things I’ve noticed in my life is people seek to break free of the transactional life. Retail is looked down upon, I think, because people naturally hate the clarity of it. When you sell direct, you have to do so in a way that people like. Every lost sale is an indictment of you and your product. It’s why the toughest, smartest guys in most business are the sales guys. They have no illusions about themselves.

The media has sought to break free from the retail relationship. Selling ads based on circulation and viewership is a daily confirmation of your worth, or lack thereof. The result of this drive, on the one hand, has been the thoroughly corrupt cable TV market where content providers get a free shot at your wallet.

On the other hand, a massive, taxpayer subsidized nonprofit system has been created to fund writers, newspapers, journals and even academics. Look around a think tank and these people are calling each other “fellow” and “resident scholar” as honorifics. It’s no wonder C-level joke writers like Jonah Goldberg have developed massive egos. Everyone calls him “fellow” down at the institute!

Back in the 1990’s when newspaper circulations were collapsing, I read a story about a paper in Dayton Ohio. They hired a consultant to tell them why they were losing customers. The consultant pointed out that their food section was running stories on haute cuisine while their readers ate hamburger helper. In other words, the product sucked so people stopped buying it.

That’s much tougher in the current moment. The product certainly sucks, but people are not dropping TV in big numbers yet. Similarly, the tax-exempt rackets face no threat from Congress. There are plenty of billionaires willing to finance papers like the NYTimes and Washington Post. Maybe the only response is for voters to support the candidates the media hates the most.

Trump – Cruz 2016: They are as much fun as chemotherapy, but they are what you need to fight the tumor that is the media.

I could not bring myself to watch any of the debate. I flipped over to see Trump for a minute or two, but I was not all that interested in him either. These debate shows are a good example of what’s wrong with American politics. They are talent shows for the managerial class where we get to see inside the conference room of the bipartisan fusion party headquarters.

One of the stranger things about the modern mass media age is how much of it is make believe. I can think of exactly one debate that truly mattered and that was Nixon – Kennedy in 1960. How much it mattered is debatable. Otherwise, debates are like football games. People tune in to root for their team. Few minds are changed. At this stage, no minds are changed as they have been doing these shows for six months.

That said, I enjoy reading the commentariat the day after. They put on their serious face and lecture the rubes about what really happened in the debate. Because their true motivation is to burnish their class status, they personalize their analysis in the hopes of elevating their status in the club. It’s silly parlor politics among men who have made a career of telling the women what they would do if they had the chance.

This one caught my attention.

Finally, this debate was a fascinating glimpse into what might have been absent the disrupting force of Donald Trump. Bush was far more at ease without one of the candidates hurling middle school insults at him, and the debate itself was substantive — showcasing the GOP’s most effective communicators. This is why people said the GOP had a “deep bench” in 2016. Absent Trump, the three-man contest likely would have been between Bush, Rubio, and Cruz. But might-have-beens are irrelevant, and in this evening’s audition for the best alternative to Donald Trump, Marco Rubio won the night.

That’s their complaint in a nutshell. The big meanie, the bully, has wrecked their fun. It’s not fair. Without Trump, panda men of the managerial class could have had tea and calmly discussed the really important stuff, like how to best rearrange the commas in the regulatory code. Instead, that vulgar dirt monster and his populism ruined it!

Mark Steyn the other day made the very good point that these pusillanimous popinjays make excellent money scribbling for popular websites and chattering on TV. Being right or even being popular does not factor into their thinking because it has no impact on their lifestyle. The guys and gals who spent a year selling Mitt Romney still had jobs after Romney lost what was a very winnable election.

Once you decouple the paycheck from performance, the performance collapses. In the dreaded private sector, this is well known. Go into a UPS office and it is a model of efficiency. Go into a US Post Office and it is a sclerotic nightmare of bureaucratic asshattery. The reason is in the former, performance and pay are linked, while in the latter the pay remains the same no matter what you do.

It’s an interesting thing we are seeing with our media. The cable rackets and the donor system have conspired to populate the ranks of journalism with ball washers and yes men. In an attempt to turn the media into a megaphone for the ruling elite, they have emasculated it.  Worse yet, their insularity has made them vulnerable to even a mild breeze of discontent.

I’m reminded of this from H. G. Wells:

‘It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure— had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!”

It was not so long ago that you could not afford to make enemies in the elite media, if you wanted to have a public life. The old saying was, “never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” People like Mark Steyn, Ann Coulter, Steve Sailer and many others are getting on fine as enemies of the state media. Now, Donald Trump is doing well as an enemy of the state parties. Those who are deeply invested in the state have good reason to fear the wreckers.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of the current insurrection is watching the popinjays in the Conservative Establishment writhe in agony at being cast as establishment men. Their utter astonishment at the little people, the hoi polloi, giving them the business about their perfidy and cronyism has been a blast. In the Bush years I developed a healthy dislike for many of the more oleaginous charlatans in the commentariat. My heart feels like an alligator.

A theme around here is that the panic in conservative media is due to the sudden rush of dis-conformation washing over them. For the longest time, they have believed they are the vanguard of a popular revolt against the Progressive establishment. Suddenly, everyone has joined a different revolt, a revolt against them. These putative champions of the people are like the character in the supernatural mystery film that suddenly learns he is the villain.

Here’s an interesting piece on the same theme. I wonder if this guy is a reader.

Once upon a time, in the immediate postwar years, the elites who ran the country’s two major political parties were part of the country’s broader political establishment, which included the owners of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time magazine, the heads of the three national television networks, and the directors of a small number of leading political, cultural, and religious institutions.

This establishment was dominated by an ideology of liberal centrism that one of its key figures famously described as “the vital center.” It fostered, cultivated, and presided over a broad consensus in favor of the New Deal at home and the Cold War containment of communism abroad.

From the beginning, the modern conservative movement thought of itself as an insurrection against the liberal establishment and its representatives at the head of the Republican Party. One of the movement’s formative, galvanizing events was the 1955 founding of National Review by William F. Buckley, Jr. as a place where right-wing intellectuals could work on fashioning an anti-liberal governing ideology. Less than a decade later, the magazine championed the populist candidacy of Barry Goldwater in the hopes that he would depose the reigning liberal consensus and pursue a policy of rolling back both the New Deal and the Soviet Union.

The effort failed. But by the mid-1970s, the movement had been joined by a new group of intellectuals. In addition to uncommonly sharp polemical skills and a training in policy analysis, the formerly liberal neoconservatives brought to the movement an awareness that to succeed it would need foment a counter-establishment, both to help overthrow the liberal establishment and to serve as an alternative to it once an electoral victory had been achieved.

I’d add that the so-called neoconservatives never abandoned their technocratic impulses. They just rejected the dovishness of the New Left, preferring a more muscular response to the Soviets.

This counter-establishment tasted power for the first time with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan 35 years ago, and since then it has grown massively in strength and influence. Today the counter-establishment simply is the conservative and Republican establishment.

And yet, because its ideological outlook was formed when it was out of power, this establishment seems incapable of thinking about itself as an establishment. And so we get the editor of National Review, a regular fixture on TV, saying (presumably with a straight face) that his magazine, which has been closely read among leading members of the Republican Party for decades, isn’t a part of the Republican establishment.

I’ll note that an integral part of Progressive mythology is the struggle. Despite being in charge for close to a century, Progressives still think of themselves as an insurgent minority at war with their oppressive overlords. Elizabeth Warren is worth millions, yet she spends her time in the Senate ranting about the one percent. Her neighbors in the one percent cheer her on. It’s false consciousness.

Another theme around here is that the two sides of the American political elite are two sides of the old Yankee elite. Yankeedom came to dominate America after the Civil War and has occupied the commanding heights ever since. The old Yankee sense of being a soldier of God in a fallen world morphed into a worldview where they are always the heroic underdog of their story. Both sides of the ruling class see themselves as noble warriors fighting the good fight against the ruling class.