This is such an interesting and thought provoking article. It’s kind of a grand unified theory of woke culture. As author David Samuels explains it, woke culture may have gestated in the fever swamps of leftist academia but it came to dominate our national discussion and overtook the political structures we’d all grown up learning about in school because its methods were useful to certain progressive politicians, especially Barack Obama.
Samuels is telling this story as the history of particular ideas about social control going back to the 1920 but his own introduction to it really began with the Iran deal which he reported on as it was happening.
When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.
But this wasn’t the end of the echo chamber, in fact it was only the beginning. Next up was Russiagate.
The conspiratorial messaging campaign targeting Trump as a Kremlin-controlled “asset” who had been elected on direct orders from Vladimir Putin himself seemed more like the plot of a dark satire than something that rational political observers might endorse as a remotely plausible real-world event. Having reported on the Iran deal made it easy to see that Russiagate was a political op, being run according to a similar playbook, by many of the same people. Familiarity with the Iran deal made it easy for reporters at Tablet, particularly Lee Smith, to see Russiagate as a fraud from the beginning, and to see through the methods by which the hallucination was being messaged by the mainstream press….
Needless to say, the model of politics in which operatives are constantly running permission structure games on the body politic, assisted by members of the press and think tankers eager to be of service to the party, has more in common with pyramid schemes and high-pressure network-marketing scams than it does with reasoned democratic deliberation and debate. At this point, it hardly seems controversial to point out that such a model of politics is socially toxic.
Even as Russiagate was winding down, the same tools were turned toward a new and even larger target: the Covid pandemic.
Messaging around the pandemic was the fourth and most far-reaching permission structure game that was run by small clusters of operatives on the American public, resulting in the revocation of the most basic social rights—like the right to go outside your own home, or visit a dying parent or child in the hospital. COVID also proved to be an excuse for the largest wealth transfer in American history, comprising hundreds of billions of dollars, from the middle and working classes to the top 1%. Most ominously, COVID proved to be a means for remaking the American electoral system, as well as providing a platform for a series of would-be social revolutions in whose favor restrictions on public gatherings and laws against looting and public violence were suspended, due to manifestations of “public opinion” on social media.
Fauci and his minions knew a lab leak was a real possibility but wanted to prevent it from being discussed and gaining traction. They whipped up a supposedly scientific article saying it was all but impossible specifically to control the narrative. They browbeat skeptics into submission, at least for a while. Samuels describes this new approach as totalitarian in nature.
The permission structure machine that Barack Obama and David Axelrod built to replace the Democratic Party was in its essence neither modern nor conservative, though. Rather it is totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and better beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure, which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator. The integrity of the individual is violated in order to further the superior interests of the superego of humanity, the party, which knows which beliefs are right and which are wrong. The party is the ghost in the machine, which appears to run on automatic pilot, using the human desire for companionship and social connection as fuel for an effort to detach individuals from their own desires and substitute the dictates of the party, which is granted the unlimited right to enforce its superior opinions on all of mankind…
The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create.
This helps explain why silencing, shunning and of course canceling are the most frequent tools used by woke activists, i.e. tools of social coercion. You either go along with the party line or you risk paying a steep price for speaking against it. At a minimum that price could be being viewed as a troglodyte unworthy of being part of polite society. At the worst, it could mean an avalanche of death threats, public confrontation and losing your job. On the other hand, providing service to the party and its goals can result in public praise, access to friendly media, and a kind of tenuous respect.
But of course the dictates of the party change constantly in a process that Samuels calls Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment (that’s the title of his piece). This is the process whereby people who want to remain on the inside, surrounded by social approval, instantly adopt the latest fad belief about topics like gender or race, at least superficially. Privately, most people have their doubts about DEI, affirmative action, giving children hormones, trans women in women’s sports, etc. The doubts are fine so long as most people are too afraid to speak up about them. As Samuels sees it, the whole apparatus began to collapse when Elon Musk bought Twitter, taking it away from the people who were creating the echo chambers.
Bullying large numbers of people into faddish hyperconformity by controlling the machinery of social approval may require both money and technique, but it is not art or thought. In fact, it is something like the opposite of thought. Lost in the hypercharged mirror world that they had created, they decided that having made themselves cool also made them right, and that evidence to the contrary could be safely dismissed as a “right-wing talking point.” Obama’s operatives shared the same character flaw as their master, a kind of brittle, Ivy League know-it-all-ness that demanded that they always be the smartest person in the room…
By letting Twitter go, and then making war on its new owner, in a belated attempt to get him to do their bidding, the Obama party showed both the scope of its ambition and also its hubris—a combination that split the country’s oligarchy on the eve of the key election that would have allowed the party to consolidate its power.
They are still doing their best to punish Musk. If they can find a way to destroy him, they will. The same people who never had a bad word to say about George Soros, funder of uncountable progressive organizations and candidates, are suddenly outraged at having an unelected billionaire involved in politics.
Samuels wraps this all up by arguing that both Trump and Netanyahu were to the other key elements in bringing and end to the new world that Barack Obama tried to build. In his return, Trump triumphed over Obama’s successors, Biden and Harris. For his part, Netanyahu blew up the idea that Iran was a burgeoning power that needed to be catered to and normalized. That bet isn’t looking so good after the collapse of Syria and the defeat of both Hamas and Hezbollah.
The whole thing is worth reading especially for its insights on how social media was manipulated for social control.
