An understatement............

 When it came to the economy, the federal government’s framework of understanding had lost touch with the truth.

-Martin Gurri, from here

What strange times we live in...............

One of my favorite pundits looks at the 2024 presidential race and has some thoughts.  Hope he is wrong about Bobby Kennedy, Jr.

 To earn the nomination, however, DeSantis will have to persuade an angry Republican base of his alienation from the government he is expected to preside over. He must demonstrate that, despite his orthodox trajectory and obvious ease with handling policy, he is not a mere politician or a creature of the institutions. Just as the Democratic Party today is the home of establishment and reaction, Republicans are the party of populism and revolt. By an inner necessity, the Democrats will nominate a safe insider; that happens to be Joe Biden’s sole qualification for the presidency. The inverse process will turn the Republican contest into a scramble for the outside rail.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay

The passing of journalism....................

 In any case, the fantasy of the relentless muckraker has been quietly discarded in the digital age. Journalists are now meek handmaidens to the elites and bland deniers of scandal. Democracy, in their view, demands the public’s permanent genuflection before the ruling class. Any other posture smacks of populism or even fascism. The hero is no longer the investigative reporter but the “fact-checker”—a dull but peevish beast whose task it is to count the lies of Donald Trump and dismiss reports of corruption in high places as “conspiracy theories” and “disinformation.” Such naked prostration before the establishment, it should be noted, has less to do with journalistic principles than with a desperate need to attract a paying audience.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay

If only our elites were more elite.................

 A vast apparatus of control—an octopus-like conglomerate of institutions that includes the federal bureaucracy, the news media, and the digital platforms—has been deployed to stop the populist wolf from crashing through the door. The panic evoked by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter betrays an unhappy suspicion that the beast will break in anyway. The system is as nakedly rank-based as Marie Antoinette’s France. Having assumed guardianship over the complexities of twenty-first-century life, the elites must govern because they are who they are.

-Martin Gurri, from here