This comment from ErisGuy raises an interesting question.

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.