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Friday, September 09, 2016

Outsider candidates and the media, 1964-2016

My latest post appears here.

1 comment:

Bozon said...

Professor
Great post. We have certainly been directed, more or less by the media in the past.

I want to touch on a point you also allude to, the role of insider politicians, not outsiders, in both parties, and a formerly national media, and a consensus both within that media and among the parties which lasted for some decades, on what you call national purpose.

It seems to me that this is an area where that collaboration of elites, in both parties, with a national media establishment, also did us a great deal of harm, as a nation, especially where foreign policy, investment, and transnational commerce have been at play.

Both parties promoted globalization, each for very different reasons, over time, but both committed to the concept, even to the exclusion of domestic prosperity, and frankly a sense of merely national purpose.

Each party had its own ideology for this state of affairs.

My view is that those two different ideologies are each based on false premises, albeit of very different kinds. Those premises each go back to the founding, not just to WWI however.

The upshot, however, of this long ad hoc consensus on globalization is that they have together tended to send us in a more and more dangerous, not merely unprosperous, direction, from which there is no longer any exit available.

I have also admitted, though, on my blog that there is, as I see it, an element of inevitability about this outcome, given our founding principles... So be it.

All the best