Social media gives us the ability to connect with millions of our fellow countrymen, and it also encourages echo chambers. We can have our discussions here– but right next-door, in the same digital space, there are people planning riots and looting.
The process of tearing down the legitimacy of a regime is very fast. We saw it in the Arab Spring. But the Arab Spring wasn’t “people power”– it was the ability of a group of organized subversives (Muslim Brotherhood) to use grievance narratives to bring down governments.
The narratives we’ve seen over the last decade show social media “democracy activists” tearing down authoritarian regimes. We imagine these regimes to be always evil– and in many cases, they are.
But there’s no reason why this has to be the case.
With these riots and protests, we see the fruits of the “Evil, Racist America” narrative reach critical mass. Up until the age of social media, this was a fringe view in college campuses, with Nation of Islam and Socialist book stores. It’s utterly mainstream now.
As I’ve been saying here from the start, a regime can’t last if its elite institutions believe the regime is illegitimate, and if their sense of justice demands that it must fall. Defining “white supremacy” as synonymous with America system does nothing but agitate for its fall.
There are some folks for whom it’s eternally 2003. They look at these attitudes and narratives from the left and they assume they’re still stuck in the college campuses and Socialist book stores. They think we just have to point out the absurdity and radicalism of this view.
But we’re so far beyond that now. When middle class people who make a good living and have kids now buy into the prog narrative– and they do, by the millions–we’re not in 1968 anymore. Or 72 or 80. There still might be a Silent Majority, but it’s nowhere what it was.
It’s funny that those who believe that America is simply a propositional nation, founded on nothing but ideas, seem to be the least likely to acknowledge that significantly fewer people buy into those ideas anymore. It’s at best a tie.
I wish we’d have done a better job of defeating the narratives that undermine the legitimacy our regime.