Thread by @feelsdesperate

Fantastic piece in Tablet.

Samuels makes some very interesting assertions.

First, he argues that David Axelrod, who excelled at getting affluent white urbanites to vote for black mayors, brought an advertising mentality to politics. Axelrod’s father was a psychologist…

…and his mother was an ad exec. Axelrod’s innovation was to create ‘permission structures’ - or socialization frameworks - that would lead people to vote against their own interests because they wanted to see themselves as the sort of socially desirable person who would vote…

…for a specific candidate (‘I am a Good Person, not a regressive chud, etc’). This tendency subsequently transformed politics from focusing on material negotiations to generating social status. People were way more enthusiastic about being ‘Obama voters’…

…than anything he promised or ended up doing.

The second assertion, which I’ve heard from Jacob Siegel too and is under appreciated, is that the unified ideological mechanism that includes the media, academia, gov’t, NGOs, and professional elites is best dated…

…back to the Iran deal, years before Trump or COVID. Corporate journalism was already being hollowed out and couldn’t offer the true expertise required to critically scrutinize a complex foreign policy matter like the Iran deal. So the Obama administration was able…

…to astroturf an apparatus of fake expertise and credentialism that served as a feedback loop (Ben Rhodes’ ‘echo chambers’) to validate the administration’s decisions.

Iran deal approbation was consciously engineered by the Obama administration including fiction writer…

…Rhodes, but this complex of institutions, what Wesley Yang calls the Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus, was deployed again and again from ‘Russia collusion’ to COVID to Hunter’s laptop to trans woo to the point where it became the reflexive means of ideological and…

…cultural ‘consensus making.’

Samuels views this externalized technological and technocratic apparatus as fundamentally totalitarian in that it creates a simulacrum of public assent that is used to subvert the role actual public opinion played in 20th century American…

…politics.

Samuels also views Trump’s 2024 victory as primarily a defeat of Obama and Obamism, not so much in terms of policy or personality but rather in the systematic dismantling of an entire bureaucratic/ ideological complex that facilitated Obama’s rise,…

…that was his most important instrument during his presidency, and that he still pulled the strings of after he left office. Samuels points out that simultaneous with the smashing of this apparatus, Obama has looked gaunt and sickly, like his life force has been extracted.
…

Anyways, the whole piece is worth your time:
tabletmag.com/feature/rapid-…