Thankfully, Some Things Never Change

A few reflections on an extraordinary year, as we give thanks and burn the Yule log

There was a fascinating article in Tablet recently by David Samuels, the editor of County Highway (co-founded with America This Week’s Walter Kirn). The article traced the history of an effort beginning in the Obama years at “rewiring the machinery that produced what a brilliant young political theorist named Walter Lippmann once identified, in his 1921 book, as ‘public opinion.’”

Samuels posited a vast unreported story, in which “manufacturing consent” was re-imagined for the Internet age. A new machinery of leaks, lies, and content suppression let ruling powers generate “rapid-onset political enlightenment” on demand. Authorities used digital tools to move ideas about racism or Russiagate or “social distancing” from the fringe to the mainstream in an instant, creating “permission structures” that allowed mush-brained members of the donor class to embrace concepts they first heard minutes ago. Panics spread like viruses, with each thought-disease cresting and breaking at its own pace, forcing the uninfected to beat exhausting retreats to “parallel thought-worlds.”

The major difference between what we just experienced and previous periods of collective madness is that while, say, the Red Scare of the fifties froze America in a conservative delirium, punishing the slightest deviations from a patriotic norm, the recent merger of national security agencies with Madison Avenue and the press stressed instant conformity to radical change. It almost didn’t matter what the change was, it just had to be far out. The power to move people off long-held beliefs was the important proof of concept. Hence the weirdness of so much of what we’ve lived through, from “biological sex” or “natural immunity” becoming forbidden science to liberalism’s overnight rejection of the Bill of Rights.

I’ll buy what Samuels is selling. What’s more, I bet in twenty or even ten years, a canny cultural historian will give his thesis a catchy nickname that will stick to this just-concluded period (The Great Fever? The Orange Panic?). At least, I hope. If you subscribe to this site it’s likely because, like me, you felt the world slipping off its axis and were looking for someone to reassure you you weren’t crazy. We lived through a difficult time together, but the fever finally broke this fall, and the world is now allowed to remark on the Emperor’s lack of clothes. It feels like good news, but what now? Can we go back a normal life? Will it last?

I think so, for a time. Samuels credits a cast of characters like Donald Trump and Elon Musk and even Benjamin Netanyahu (!) with breaking the spell through sheer stubbornness, the real cause of the turnaround was probably more prosaic. A core reflex in these decades of postmodern insanity was constant rejection of things we thought we knew in favor of New, Improved Beliefs packaged from above. But some things don’t change. Until we do away with holidays, little kids will always have the same look on their faces I’ll see tomorrow morning, when mine unwrap their presents. Farts will always be funny, teenagers will always menace cars and have too much sex, NBA players will always travel, and parents bound by love for their children will always find peace growing old together. Fundamental things do apply, as time goes by.

Mad scientists who think they can redesign human experience are always undone by eternal truths that arrogance won’t allow them to grasp, one being that life isn’t so bad, another that there are some things people will never understand. But that’s the good news. Learning to embrace the unknown is what allows us to be happy, in our handful of turns on the planet. Heavy thoughts for Christmas, but I mean it in a good way. I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that first the first time in ages, the exhaustion of managing parallel truths has subsided. Now we just have one crazy world to worry about. Normal feels normal. Christmas feels like Christmas. We’ve won a panic reprieve. Happy holidays, everyone. I’m glad we all made it here together.