Zaid Jilani: The Blue Stack Strikes Back

I’ve long been targeted by this Blue Stack.

Tablet:

“First, activists create a panic about misinformation or offensive speech. Second, the social media platforms try to meet them halfway by introducing measures like warning labels. Third, the activists realize they’ve drawn blood, and continue to push for outright censorship. Finally, the social media platforms give in and remove the offending voice from their platforms altogether.

The institutions successfully driving this push for ideological conformity across American life—progressive nonprofits, large portions of the news media, woke corporations, Democrats in government—can collectively be called the “blue stack,” which represents an enforcement mechanism for the ruling ideology to express hegemony over American democracy. …

The blue stack presents America’s elite with something they’ve always craved but has been out of reach in a liberal democracy: the power to swiftly crush ideological opponents by silencing them and destroying their livelihoods. Typically, American cultural, business, and communication systems have been too decentralized and too diffuse to allow one ideological faction to express power in that way. American elites, unlike their Chinese counterparts, have never had the ability to imprison people for wrong-think or derank undesirables in a social credit system. …

In its current arrangement, the blue stack is unsustainable. Continuing to marginalize large swaths of the country will result in increased polarization and even greater suspicion between ordinary Americans and elites. The week before Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify, the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of science, released a report warning governments and social media platforms not to rely on censorship to combat scientific information, noting that “removing content may exacerbate feelings of distrust.”

Quite right: What the United States needs now more than anything is trust. We must learn to get along with each other, even if not everything everyone says is always 100% scientifically accurate or conforms to rapidly evolving progressive standards of etiquette. Trying to berate and bully ordinary people and the outlets they enjoy into submission will only push them into ever darker modes of thought. For the sake of democracy, we have to find a way to break up the blue stack and reinvigorate pluralism in the United States. …”

I’m not too worried about it.

Zaid Jilani zeroes in on exactly its fatal flaw.

Twenty years ago, the professional class controlled both political parties. CNN was a cable news juggernaut. The “mainstream media” still had a national footprint. “Journalists” were far more respected. There was far more trust in American institutions. The precious “norms” were in far better shape. America was at the apex of its geopolitical power. Bill Kristol was still taken seriously. Stephen Colbert was still funny. The SPLC and ADL were highly respected “watchdog organizations.” The Voting Rights Act was renewed with nearly unanimous Republican support. The guys from the Lincoln Project were running John McCain’s presidential campaign. We’ve come a long way since then.

Far from being all powerful, progressive activists are still 6% of the adult population. Joe Rogan is being targeted for cancelation because he has an audience 10x the size of the CNN audience. Donald Trump was deplatformed from Twitter, but no one spends all day on Twitter except for political junkies and losing his megaphone helped Trump and made him more popular. The mainstream media is a pale shadow of its former self. Facebook is actually in decline now. Cancel culture and censorship are signs of political weakness, not strength. Authoritarian methods are being used out of desperation.

Politically speaking, Democrats are approaching a nadir of power. After the 2022 midterms, political scientists will be noting that the Democratic Party hasn’t been this weak in a century with Joe Biden leading the party to a new low beyond even the 2010 wipeout under Barack Obama. Biden is polling significantly lower than Obama. So, all of the cancellations and censorship really hasn’t made progressives any stronger, but more disliked and resented by ever wider swathes of the population. It has just imposed various hardships on those who have been targeted by them.

What these people are doing in the long run is enlarging and radicalizing their opposition. They are “in power” now, but not really in power due to their razor thin Senate majority, the state legislatures and the Supreme Court. The progressive brand is too toxic and too much of an albatross for Democrats to compete in large swathes of the country like Iowa or Ohio which are gone now.

Liberals used to dominate the mass media. That’s no longer the case. They only had a head start and conservatives have caught up with them and have recently started to surpass them. It will be the same way with tech with progressive activists having a head start, abusing their power and spurring the growth of an alternative tech ecosystem over time where they have no control over who has a platform.

“Extremism researchers” have recently been sounding the alarm that “hate” has gone “mainstream.” What’s new is that people like Michelle Malkin attend the Amren conference or that sitting congressmen like Rep. Paul Gosar are associating with Nick Fuentes or that Charlie Kirk wants transplants to be banned from Red States. Millions of Trump supporters would go straight to violence to restore him to power. These are all signs that the precious “norms” are dissolving as the mainstream media collapses.

A few years from now, we will look back on Trump 2016 like we look back on Romney 2012.