Time to Reflect

A poll was just released showing that 48% of Americans haven’t heard a single thing about Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. This confirms a feeling I've been having lately that the era of a shared mainstream news/media narrative the citizens of western nations have lived under since at least WW II is ending. Online news is so fragmented and overwhelming people are checking out, having not much more idea of the world around them than a medieval peasant did of theirs. Those who do try to keep up are barraged with news stories so quickly they have little time for reflection on any single event before the next one takes over their social media feed. The result is a sort of collective amnesia, as each new story displaces the previous one from our consciousness. Even a story as big as the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities mostly disappeared after a few days.

Prior to the Internet being central to our lives, we had a mainstream media where most people got major, but more limited news. Everyone watched the same TV shows at the same time because that’s when they aired. The result was a shared reality and narrative of our world. There was time to reflect on and discuss significant events like the OJ Simpson trial, Rodney King riots, the Clinton impeachment, the Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine, etc. These events didn’t just come and go from our collective consciousness in a matter of days. We talked about them, thought about them, debated them, and often passed new legislation because of them.
Stuck culture – where there no longer seems to be noticeable cultural changes in music, fashion, or movies like we experienced decade by decade in the 20th century – is one symptom of this loss of a national narrative (no mainstream media with the power to drive new cultural trends). One insightful comment I read about stuck culture was that the only way you can tell when a movie was made in the last 20 years was by the differences in technology (e.g. flip-phone vs. smart phone).

It's hard to know what this will mean economically. Without a shared narrative of where we’ve been and where we’re going, national issues – economic, environmental, etc. – seem tougher to resolve. How can we tackle complex issues if they can’t hold our attention for more than a day or two? So I see economic and government policies in general being more scattershot and ineffectual going forward. Relatedly, as the fourth estate fades into irrelevance, I see less accountability for politicians’ behavior and policies. While we can expect the invisible hand of capitalism to continue to propel the American economy forward, it will likely do so in spite of our political leadership (both Democratic and Republican) rather than because of it.