Conservative media outlets in the US are almost entirely concerned with electoral politics. While there are occasionally seasonal detours onto bureaucratic issues (like local bans on nativity displays — a point of conflict going back centuries in Anglo-American societies) and local crime stories, most of the air time on shows like Rush Limbaugh’s or channels like Fox News concern what elected officials are doing, and how campaigns are shaping up.
This makes the viewers obsess over what politicians are and aren’t doing, while keeping the focus current. News is supposed to be new, so when people spend their lives accumulating a stack of knowledge which is recent and shallow, divorced from the relevant context. The democratic mind winds up orbiting around ‘issues’ which are often the consequences of decisions made in previous decades or centuries.
For example, a pundit will talk about the ‘immigration debate,’ but will not usually bring up the directly relevant context of the predictions made by the Johnson administration at the time of the end of most of the immigration quotas, and comparing those predictions to the results of the policies of his administration.
Media channels create fictional — under the ‘reality TV model’ — narratives about politicians which tend to focus on their personalities, along with their stands on arbitrarily chosen ‘issues.’ These issues must be framed in a way that can be comprehended by the median voter while still exciting the party faithful.
In modern states, elected politicians tend to have rather limited influence. It’s not so much that there’s no difference between the political parties, it’s more that the politicians once elected have little influence over what bills get passed, what’s written into bills, and how the existing beureacracies are administered.
In effect, these political news channels act as cover and public relations for the real work of government, to create a greater sense of popular legitimacy. The hack around some of the crises of democracy has been to make it so that the people are only extensively polled and consulted on the selection of actors in the television show that purports to be about the American government.
Polling for the actual work of the state tends to be done to measure the effectiveness of what intellectuals and administrators already wanted to do. Even if public support for a proposal is low to start with, that’s just the baseline of opinion that administrators have to work with before they mount their effort to change society. Only rarely does widespread opposition to a proposal stop such an effort in its tracks — if it’s a high enough priority, popular consent can be engineered through the use of propaganda.
People will first note that massive immigration was not a result of popular vote, and that illegal immigration is highly unpopular. They will then say that the Democrats are using immigration to import more Democratic voters. But if they can get massive social change on the scale of tens of millions of immigrants without voter approval, what do they need the voters for?
The immigrants must be for some other purpose.
The same can be said for a whole range of leftist issues, like gay ‘marriage’ and abortion, they’re deeply unpopular ‘on the ground’ yet seem to sail unopposed in to legislation.
Yes, that is quite true. The notion that we live in a democracy where the will of the people is responsible for the direction of the country is a farce. It isn’t true now, and I don’t think it’s ever been true. We have always been ruled by an elite that does whatever the hell it wants. This includes the cultural elite that drives the “popular” culture. We don’t have sex and violence on TV because the people demand it. It’s there because the cultural elite want it there.
re: “The immigrants must be for some other purpose.” Augustina
Very perceptive! Give the girl a Kewpie Doll.
The answer will likely get me banned. Changing the demographics of the country is better for the Jews. The Jews have spent a century transforming a 90% White country into the diverse, multicultural, vibrant and nearly ungovernable mess it is now, a one party democracy. Read the trilogy: The Culture of Critique, A People That Shall Dwell Alone, and Separation and Its Discontents by Kevin MacDonald.
There is a reason the Jews have been run out of nearly every country in Europe since the time of the Romans. Whites never learn.
Dan Kurt
I’m interested to know what the Johnson admin’s predictions were??????
Same here though I am fair certain it was promised that the usa would not be overran by vibrants and diversity
There are no political options which addres demographic issues.
I would place this obsession with women’s suffrage: the 19th Amendment. Women are generally more concerned than men with appearance over substance. Now that women make up the majority of the electorate this obsession has gone into overdrive.
From Vedic prophecy – “political leaders will virtually consume the citizens”
Indeed, the individual is now very much part of the political life, if only in an illusory sense. Over half of the air-time, especially for Conservatives, is electoral politics non-stop. It’s not a bad way of tricking people into thinking they make a difference.