"If conventional U.S. political leaders had been properly doing their jobs, Donald Trump would still be hosting a television show," @wrmead writes, in a stunning denial of the power of television and the collapse of civic literacy in America. /1
wsj.com/articles/the-v…
wsj.com/articles/the-v…
This is an analysis that not only ignores history but assumes that citizens in 2016 were thinking very deeply about Chinese supply chains instead of walking out of Best Buy with huge TVs, and that they repudiated "the establishment" for the reasons Mead hopes they did. /2
Of course, this is always the fallback when citizens do dumb things. Endless wars and a recession made them angry! Sure. Must be why the public was angry with "the Establishment" in 2000 - before 9/11, before 2008, during a 30yr low in unemployment, as Mike Kinsley noted here. /3 
But wait...maybe by 2000, the Establishment failures were clear! That's why there was a populist revolt against the Centrists!
Or - uh oh - maybe it happened in 1990, a decade earlier, as well. Here's the late William Greider warning us that democracy was toast back then. /4
Or - uh oh - maybe it happened in 1990, a decade earlier, as well. Here's the late William Greider warning us that democracy was toast back then. /4
The "Establishment" has now died at the hands of populism so many times it's amazing anyone elected in those days survived the subsequent populist Purges, like McConnell (elected 1984) or Schumer (1980) or Pelosi (1987).
Or, you know, maybe it's not that. /5
Or, you know, maybe it's not that. /5
Maybe people don't really care about the stuff Mead cares about - not least b/c they don't understand most of it - and just keep sending their own guys back because they want them to deliver stuff from DC.
And maybe they watch too much TV and listen to too much talk radio. /6
And maybe they watch too much TV and listen to too much talk radio. /6
Mead's not wrong about China. FTR, I tried to get my boss in the Senate to vote against China MFN status (remember that?) over thirty years ago. But hey, The People Have Spoken, and The People want cheap stuff. The average person cannot explain "supply chain" and doesn't care. /7
It's always a danger, as my friend @roddreher notes, when public intellectuals fall in love with their own ideas. Mead is sledgehammering a giant square peg into a tiny round hole, right up there with "this will end globalization," but that's another subject for another time. /8x
