He may be right about the new role of the social media, replacing both the old MSM and the “new” alternative media (Fox News plus the various websites and blogs). Both of these may be losing out to the new social media among the young.
But, if that indeed is true, then it only shows that we have moved fully into the bread and circuses demagogic world. I question whether the conservative message can win if enough of the populace is dumbed down enough.
Of course, perhaps the social media are only tools and not shapers of (non)knowledge. One may hope. They are too new to know for sure.
But I fear that they actually are changing the way people (don’t) think, and not for the better.
Furthermore, most of the analysis I’ve seen so far emphasized how Obama used the social media to grease his GOTV machine.
I think Viguerie needs to consider whether the real source of Rommney’s loss wasn’t the early voting system combined with a data-mining and sophisticatedly connected use of the social media, a combination of old-fashioned political hustle that could be more effective because of early voting with the new means of interconnecting the various pieces of the hustling operation.
It’s probably a combination of all of these. Alienating the Tea Party hurt him. Failing to deliver a strong conservative message as an alternative hurt him. Yes. But so too did a sophisticated GOTV operation spread out over more than a month—that’s just as new a factor as the social media are.
Put them all together and you’ve got bread and circuses, mobocracy, hell on earth.
Just how is the conservative message, even if GOPe learn to use the new social media, going to get through when the whole political landscape has become bread and circuses and race-baiting and when more than half the people are dumber than a bag of rocks.
I’ve been teaching college undergrads for 30 years. There’s been an appalling decline in ability to think for themselves combined with an appallingly exaggerated sense of their own preciousness.
They are next to unteachable now.
They are next to unteachable now.
My wife, the now (thankfully) retired university instructor, will move and second, automatically. ;)