Who said this?
Most politicians do not have excellent social media skills, but many will try to get noticed and have an impact (or at least hire staff members who will). As more politicians up their game on social media, more of these attempts will hit home. Ocasio-Cortez will have competition. The influence and reach of political celebrities will grow stronger, and the parties will become weaker yet.
This may be a more important trend than what is sometimes called political polarization. But what does this new, more intense celebrity culture mean for actual outcomes? The more power and influence that individual communicators wield over public opinion, the harder it will be for a sitting president to get things done. (The best option, see above, will be to make your case and engage your adversaries on social media.) The harder it will be for an aspirant party to put forward a coherent, predictable and actionable political program.
Actually, it was Tyler Cowen, but it echoes The Revolt of the Public.
But Tyler reaches this important, sobering conclusion:
Finally, the issues that are easier to express on social media will become the more important ones. Technocratic dreams will fade, and fiery rhetoric and identity politics will rule the day.
How influential is social media really though? Helping AOC unseat an establishment figure in an NYC district is one thing and not at all a bad thing but it is a remarkably rare event. Gurri doesn’t talk much, as I recall, about the role of public schools in shaping public opinion. A few decades ago, as a profoundly reactionary response to the first election of a Republican Congress in over half a century, the primary purpose of public education became instilling receptiveness to environmental evangelism, producing a universal and unquestioned oppressor-oppressed world view, marginalizing white males, and otherwise promoting mass conformity. Without that historical reality, the seeds of social media would have fallen on much rockier soil and arguably social media would not have the power currently attributed to it. Social media is censoring out any nonconformist viewpoints and it will be tempting to attribute the 2020 election of an entirely antifa-controlled government to Silicon Valley, but the more fundamental reason, I would argue, is the NEA’s purchase of the Democrat Party.
These effects began in the Kennedy administration. Television has eroded party-centric policy development to the point of irrelevancy. Go back and watch the Kennedy-Nixon debates and you will find the policy centric discussions to be quite alien. By the time Reagan came around, no one was talking about Farm policy any more. Television warped everything. I’m sure our grandparents saw the equivalent stuff happen with the advent of widespread telephone use.
Fiery rhetoric and identity politics will rule the day, right now. My guess is there will be a rather powerful backlash to Trump style politics. I doubt we will want to pursue this trend to further extremes any time soon.
Ocasio-Cortez will have competition.
We will have to see but AOC social media is sort of the mirror image of Trumps social media abilities for the Republican Party. However, I rather bored with AOC antics and rather she learned the old line that you were born with two ears and one mouth stuff. (The GND was beyond awful.) And Oman is even worse here.
I still believe one reason the rhetoric is louder and awful is because most US government political-economic policies are very close the median voter positions. So if Obama wanted to increase top marginal tax rates by 2% he is socialist. Or if Trump wants to lower legal immigrant from ~1.1M to 800K the Immigrants are coming for you.
Arthur Miller wrote several essays decades ago about the growing, and inevitably complete, adoption by politicians of the most powerful techniques of the theatre and popular culture entertainment, which included leveraging the fame and social psychology associated with celebrity culture.
In the past, I’ve characterized Gurri’s thesis about the internet and social media as “A New Hope”, and my criticism of the establishment reimposing effective controls, one way or the other, as “The Empire Strikes Back”.
In that vein, see this article from Michael Ledeen:
https://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/power-and-the-internet/