"What Is Going to Happen?"
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Gleichschaltung
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The Nazi process of 'coordination' - bringing all institutions under centralized control - directly parallels the article's discussion of how institutions are being systematically pressured to align with administration goals, from universities to media companies to labor unions
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Manufacturing Consent
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Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model explains how media systems shape public opinion through structural forces - directly relevant to the article's analysis of how information environments are being manipulated through corporate ownership, algorithm changes, and self-censorship
One year ago today, I was getting ready to head to DC to cover Donald Trump’s second inauguration. It proved to be an event marked by narcissism, grotesque obsequiousness, and Trump’s casual dismissal of the very people who had supported him, all behaviors that have continued unabated to this day.
The question that I am asked most often by readers desperate enough to imagine that I have an answer is some version of: “What is going to happen?” Lurking inside this impossible query is something worth discussing. What most people are looking for is not an omniscient prediction of the future so much as an educated guess about whether this is the new normal. Everyone knows that the Trump administration is doing bad things. But what many caring and concerned people really want to know is whether we are living in an exaggerated period of normal bad politics—an administration in which the worst characteristics of Reagan and Bush and Nixon and Pat Buchanan are magnified, but which will, like all Republican administrations, provoke its own backlash, and then be followed by some level of leftward retreat—or whether we are at the very beginning of a qualitatively new period of American history, one marked by authoritarianism and fascism, in which our fragile electoral democracy will at last be kneecapped so badly that it will not be able to grab the political pendulum and haul it back in the opposite direction.
I do not have high enough confidence to predict one or the other of these outcomes. There is only one aspect of this question that I have high confidence on: That things can still go either way. This is, in itself, a useful thing to know. It tells us that the future is uncertain and that our own behavior will help to determine what actually happens. It is, in other words, a mandate to continue fighting. Anyone who, after a single year of this administration, does nothing but declare that the worst outcome is certain is effectively an enemy to the better outcome happening. Stay away from these people.
There will be many pieces written in the next week listing all of the various outrages of the past year. I am not going to do that. What I want to do here is to touch on the two primary factors that are, I think, the most relevant
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