Do social media and Dems' fecklessness account for Trump?

As of January 2024, 97% of the U.S. population used the internet. By itself there's nothing wickedly influential and rationality-dismantling about the internet, once known as "the information superhighway." Yet the turnpike has been flooded with sewage. Also in early '24, 70% of Americans accessed social media, home of the most smarts-defying and rawest mind pollution since the Old South's slavocracy convinced more than a quarter-million young men to give their lives in the service of repressing others.

Diseased Trumpist ideology of nihilism and hate has commanded social media for a decade, reducing operational brains to a flabbergasted and appalled minority. This putrid phenomenon has led culture critic Brady Brickner-Wood to ask in an essay for The New Yorker, "How is one to engage in contemplation and debate anymore?"

Information is now chiefly disseminated and consumed in short, brain-scrambling bursts across social-media platforms.... The Democratic establishment has failed to grasp that social media is no longer a vessel for sharing reductive moralisms but, rather, a 'communicative sensation-stimulus matrix,' with its own hierarchies of fluency, as the late writer and academic Mark Fisher wrote. Concepts that can steal your attention for twenty seconds or less are the dominant currency of the attention economy, and Trump weaponizes this currency better than anyone. On some level, any revamped resistance effort to his Presidency must exist within the matrix that Fisher described.

The title of Brickner-Wood's piece is "What Happened to the Trump Resistance?" And he gives no quarter as he draws-and-quarters the left and all Democrats, which, he writes, have "spent the past decade in a perpetual state of reactivity" — a futile strategy largely played out on social media; ground zero (in his thesis) of Trumpism's persuasiveness.

How futile? Notwithstanding social platforms' ever-viler "short, brain-scrambling bursts" emitted by their chief perpetrator, his "influencers" and addle-pated suckers, Trump went on to jack up his popular vote in the post-2016 elections as no less than a psychotic. (Note: I'm not alone in applying the conspicuous label, which in-agreement columnists of the Trump-intimidated legacy press would find swiftly stricken from their commentaries. In the merely last 24 hours I heard the conservative George Conway intone it and read Canadian columnist Andrew Coyne's writing of it, admirably gussying it up as the "First Psychopath.")

Evidence, or rather self-evidence enough, remarks Brickner-Wood, that reactive resistance to Trump failed. Something or a whole lot of somethings certainly did. He attributes Democrats' fright-wigged messaging as the almost exclusive cause — almost, in that their party has withered as a voice of social decency. He writes that "it’s not just a matter of reëvaluating how to engage with these platforms; it’s the messages themselves that need reëvaluating, as well as the messengers who deliver them."

These are points are emphasized with succinct clarity. Democrats cannot be "the party of peace and justice when Obama oversaw ten times as many drone strikes as his predecessor." The passage is clear all right, though Brickner-Wood omits that the technological war-making prevalence of drones mushroomed only after George W.'s disastrous tenure. He assaults Democrats for hypocritically "castigating" Trump's "fealty to big-money interests" when they, after all, suck at the same teats. Here I'll observe that rare is the voter whose electoral conniptions center on either side's big money. More convincingly the critic goes on to note Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' lack of "ethical fortitude" in disallowing a Palestinian American to address Democratic National Conventioneers. "If the cultural resistance to Trump has in fact fallen into disrepair, these contradictions can be credited as catalysts," he concludes. One, anyway.

Trump’s 2016 win-with-asterisk "may have seemed like a fluke." But just prior to latest President Barack Obama was delivering "moral sermons and philosophical treatises" on the Harris campaign's behalf while Trump "stormed his rally stages with the certainty of a savior, portraying the world as a war-torn hellhole that only he could fix." The author disdains the virtuous philosophical approach in contemporary politics, which, while his disapproval is well founded, highlights the abysmal crudity into which so many American voters have fallen. Still, others must deal with it.

Looking back, Trump’s "defeat of Hillary Clinton seemed as if it could be written off as an aberration," which he calls "magical thinking" that "exposes the resistance as a largely ineffective endeavor." The final phrase of ineffectiveness is incontrovertible. Its forerunner is not. I confess that more than once I designated the wanna-be dictator's "victory" a black swan event. But I and countless others were simply wrong. We employed our empirical knowledge of voters' baseline rationality in electing political giants like Abe Lincoln, FDR and LBJ; we overlooked the electorate's burgeoning rot.

My stronger and easily validated disagreement with Brickner-Wood's essay, however, is its argument of soiled social media and Democrats' assorted ineptitudes as the drivers of what ails us.

The persistence of America's prima facie racism needs, by definition, no exploration. Neither does misogyny ... perhaps? Immensely more suited for the White House in 2017 — immensely as in no contest — was Hillary Clinton. Granted, her loss of winning by three million votes was due to the anachronistic Electoral College. Yet topping that was her unfortunate — in the exclusive sense of our unfortunate electoral politics — was Hillary's bombout in acquiring a penis at conception.

Moving along, the human condition must perforce be stricken from ailing minds to think that Kamala Harris' straightforward loss by more than two million votes was but tangential when seated next to both her color and gender. Widely speculated is that she could have run a better campaign; that that would have turned the violent tidal surge. I too scribbled criticisms of Kamala's strategic route, yet I can't say with confidence, and for sure no proof, that some other, more aggressive operation might have forced a loss across the victory line. Historical racism we know; misogyny we've been re-taught of late, twice.

With that, my finale arrives. Wretched social media and Democrats' weakness in confronting the plague of Trumpism are unquestioned contributions to its staying power, one that's quite possibly terminal to America's vestigial goodness. But we should never dismiss or ignore society's even more sickening twin pathogens of racism and misogyny.