Episode 195: David Leonhard and the Elite Consensus Manufacturing Machine.

The quote (from Jacob Bacharach) goes: Yeah, one of the effects, it’s to transform the news from being a precursor to political action into being merely social commodity, which is to say that what strikes me about these newsletters for the majority of their consumers is that what I think they’re really designed to do is to turn current events into a kind of social currency that can be used for conversation, that can be used to position oneself as sort of being in the know, understanding what’s going on, being relatively savvy about, you know, what’s happening within politics. But by reinforcing the sense that politics is a distinct and professional domain of politicians and maybe some media people that is sort of, like, separate from life/work management, personal economy, etc. And so one of the things that it does is it takes that sort of that self-flattering, centrist self-image of a lot of the people who consume these products, and it says politics is a profession. It is a thing that exists siloed from the rest of society, and those who attempt to act politically, outside of the professionalized realm of politics, and outside of occasionally, you know, voting, I guess, are disrupting a sort of natural order of things like why can’t they just take their ration of news that they get each morning and do what normal people do with it, which is exchange it with other people over dinner at a restaurant.

I feel like this is a sort of Baader-Meinhof syndrome situation where now that I have this as a lens I can’t not see it. It’s like a Rosetta Stone of liberalism.