This comment from ErisGuy raises an interesting question.
It’s more than strong- vs weak-horse. The character of the people has changed. They are overly deferential to their rulers, eager to learn how to behave and what to think from movie stars and to be guided by politicians. They no longer wish to make their own decisions, and desire only that others supply peace of mind.
Islam means submission. In their hearts they have submitted. Christianity means salvation. They know longer know “from what.”
Has the character of Western people changed in the last fifty years? Science tells us that large scale shifts in culture are going to take multiple generations. Those changes in culture will change the people in some way, but the sluggishness of the biological process puts a natural brake on things. The national character of Britain in 1959, for example, was not all that different from that of 1859.
But, it is hard to get around the fact that 80% of people in the Anglosphere went to Mass on Sunday just a few generations ago. Today, 80% would be hard pressed to name the nearest church. America is more Christian than Britain, but that’s changing quickly, it seems. Along with that change is a whole basket of social customs that were considered deranged a generation ago.
Of course, fifty years ago it was hard to broadcast propaganda to the whole nation. Not impossible, but not easy. Television was too new and even the power of radio was not fully understood. Governments were still using the old mass rally approach to propaganda, but adapting it to the new technology. It is only within the last thirty years or so that the ruling class has become skilled at the use of mass media.
It is said that Kennedy was the first politician to take advantage of TV, but his edge was accidental. He was good looking and his opponents were mugs. Nixon looked old even when he was young. Those who followed Kennedy did not build on his narrow use of TV. It was not until Reagan that we saw a politician employ the lessons of Hollywood and Madison Avenue to sell a candidate.
Team Clinton explicitly used Hollywood producers for the first time in a campaign. The highly polished campaign video is standard stuff now, but it was new in 1992. They also developed the idea of spin, whereby operatives would flood onto current affairs shows and monopolize the time chanting the campaign slogans. The idea of spin is common today, but it was Team Clinton that perfected it.
Has there been a more Riefenstahl-esque campaign than the selling of Obama? From beginning to end his was a use of mass media that the world had never seen. TV, radio, Internet, print, news shows, everything was saturated with the Obama message. They even had campaign videos automatically downloading to people’s DVR’s. I recall being in a party store and seeing Obama themed party supplies. Goebbels would have been gobsmacked by the efficient use of mass media by Team Obama.
What’s changed is not the character of the people, but the character of their rulers and their use of the institutions of social control. 200 years ago the state simply lacked the technological ability to monitor the daily lives of citizens. Instead, it had to be delegated. That put leadership down at the street level in every village and every block.
Compare Soviet Russia with modern China. In the Soviet Union, the party needed police on every corner to keep the population under control. That requires an enormous investment in bureaucracy, which ultimately bankrupted the system. China, in contrast, controls mass media and the currency. Both of which are possible in the modern technological age.
The Western managerial state is made possible through mass media. A single message can be broadcast to the whole public from a single source. More important is the ability to coordinate across platforms. Fifty years ago government had to politely ask Hollywood to support a war or social cause.
Today they seamlessly coordinate their efforts. The selling of ObamaCare is an obvious example as it was explicit. The White House had public ceremonies where they brought in Hollywood big shots and charged them with selling the program. At a more clandestine level, modern telecommunications makes coordination easy and seamless.
Of course, the fact that the great bulk of the public is plugged into the matrix most of their day makes it even easier to control public opinion. The people in charge wage multifaceted propaganda campaigns using TV, radio, social media, the interwebs and mobile devices. In a strange turn, all of us pay hundreds each month so the people in charge can give us instructions through our TV, the phone or the computer.
The question, of course, is whether the managerial state can survive mass media. The communications revolution may have let it flourish, but that does not mean it can arrest the mathematics. The crashing fertility rates in the West are what biologists would focus in on as a symptom of ecosystem decay. But, that’s over the horizon and I’ll be long gone by the time that question is answered.
“Coordinating across platforms” is how the Left has managed to change the character of many (too many) of the People. From every level of government, to the entire Educational establishment, from the Churches to the media and entertainment, and finally to the military. There is not one institution that remains untouched by the poisonous ideology of Progressivism. Is it any wonder that the values that made Western Civilization superior to any other are fading away? At this point only a galvanizing nation-wide crisis can save us. Or be the final nail in the coffin.
You misunderestimate the sudden decline in character. Welfare and the entitlement mentality grease the skids down to the bottom in one generation. The German character has held up best under the welfare state, but Anglo character does not do so well. Even the German character was destroyed in two generations under the Soviet thumb. It’s still a dead zone in the east.
I’ve a friend who is an elderly Cuban. He visits the old country once a year for the last twenty five years. He told me after his last visit that the last trace of those things that made Cubans Cuban had died. Many amazing stories about what that meant, but now they are just Spanish speaking zombies. I don’t think you come back from that.
Other races and ethnic groups have no resistance whatsoever, and that fuels the Progressive train down.
The same mass-media tools that are now in the hands of the powers-that-be, will be used to identify and crush the dissidents in the room. Why? Because, as the Hindenberg that is the current state crashes and burns, that’s all they will have to perpetuate themselves. Persuasion has failed, deception has failed, cheating has been exposed, so it will come down to the iron fist.
I could counter and say that without Ross Perot, Bush the Elder would have sailed to an easy victory. That would be to the discredit of team Clinton though, who seized the opportunity that Perot represented, put together the slick, focused campaign, and won the election.
I think that there are two ways to read the Obama victories. One is that they had 96% of the vote of 15% of the population locked and still had to spend untold billions to win the remaining 37% of the vote (14% + 37% = 51%). The other is the that they took the Clinton tactics to the next level and are the wave of the future.
Of course I am biased towards believing that the eras of hierarchical and Gramscian control are coming to an end. Almost every thing that the Obama campaign resorted to smacked of desperation — from the amount of money spent (and how much of it was procured) to the duplicity of much of the messaging (the AIPAC speech in particular stands out). But I believe (hope?) that it was brilliant desperation: the last act of a political class doomed to the ash heap of history. By way of analogy, consider all of the trouble the Brezhnev-era USSR brewed up across the Third World. It seemed like we were on the ropes, only to find ourselves victorious.
But if there had been no Reagan, Pope John Paul II, or Thatcher, would we have won? I’m not seeing a lot of leaders of that caliber running things right now. Maybe in some state house or board room there is a Lincoln or even a Joan of Arc waiting for the right moment. I can’t help but believe that even if there was one, there is some opposition research team waiting in the wings to find some stupid thing they said in college, a romantic indiscretion, or bad business deal.
Then I guess it it ends with the barbarian in his rough furs, sitting on the throne, being poured drink by your women, and offered the laurels of victory by your youth. If we win, it will not be easy.
I don’t know. Perot certainly changed the dynamics of the race. There’s a good argument for assigning his vote to Bush, if the option was unavailable. That is, the Perot vote was a protest vote. There’s also the data showing that many Perot voters were anti-Bush voters and would have gone to Clinton. My own sense is that the wort of people who voted for Perot were the sort of usually vote Republican or stay home.
That said, it would have been a vastly different race and much closer. Team Bush would have been able to rely on a number of states without much effort, thus being able to campaign harder in other places where they lost. That said, Perot never would have run against a strong president. His existence was due entirely to Bush being a loser.