You Say You Want A Revolution?
While Trump took advantage of social media in 2016, most political experts believe it had little impact on his election. By contrast, Ramaswamy s rise came from doing all manner of podcasts, from big to medium and even surprisingly small ones.
Whether or not the medium is the message, podcasts on the Right certainly have one: We re in a crisis of meaning. Some may remember that crisis of meaning was a mantra of Bill and Hillary Clinton s way back in 1992. Back then, the Left s solution was economic globalization; today, the Right s is economic nationalism.
And under that vision, which further strengthened its grip over the Republican Party on Wednesday night, simply bringing back some microchip manufacturing from Taiwan, which is on the verge of slipping under China s control, is just the beginning. More broadly, we could see a radical altering of the world order, with a new competition between Western liberal democracies and China and Russia for the loyalty of nonaligned nations in the developing world.
As such, the conventional wisdom was, once again, wrong. The election of Joe Biden as president in 2020 didn t restore the liberal world order and may have even destabilized it. And it s clear, in retrospect, that the populist and nationalist revolutions of 2016 not only weren t a fad, they were the future.