More history dredged from my Twitter backup
Democracy, like all conventions of limited war, is fragile. It’s hard to establish and easy to destroy. One of my main concerns is that I think the principal check that keeps the US from degenerating into actual violence is the 75-year-old informational dominance of “responsible” broadcast and newspaper journalism. This system is dying. It is being replaced by people like Amanda Marcotte and Michelle Malkin. And their followers, if not them personally, seem to have enough pure, 24-karat hate stored up for ten or fifteen really juicy civil wars.
Without “Informational Dominance”, you get civil war.
In case anyone doesn’t recognise it that’s from Unqualified Reservations, 2007, The BDH–OV conflict.
NRx is anti-journalist, in that it identifies journalists as part of the ruling system. Without informational dominance of responsible journalism, the Modern Structure falls.
My last main post was coming to grips with that informational dominance being restored. I was reflexively against it, and the post was merely adjusting to the fact it is inevitable. Good thing, Bad thing? What does that even mean. it is a thing.
Obviously a key question for the future is, will the reestablishment of informational dominance succeed? I have been anticipating that it will — the deplatforming of Trumpism is going swimmingly. It will be curious if major Trumpist figures attempt to publish via non-US internet resources, and if the establishment is willing to reverse its principles to impose a “Great Firewall of America” to block it, and if large numbers of normies are willing to use VPN or related technologies to reach them anyway.
But Moldbug was right 14 years ago: if they cannot reestablish dominance, the system will fall.