A Study in Populism -- Part 2

Trademark of Facebook

Political populism with the co-option of technology and social networking sites (SNS), such as   Facebook and Twitter, a driving force in the "digital age" of civic engagement, has been propagated by ancillary and the primary media of television, cable, and Internet. For instance, in the Pew research paper  on digital age civic engagement SNS are one of the triggering mechanism for active political engagement. In the Brooking Institute paper regarding Millennials, civic engagement means being a social consumer for fairness, equality, and corporate activism with similar values of social justice.

Image from Gizmodo Science web page

The radicalization of the extremes proffered from the digital marketplace comes as an affectation from the SNS, cable, and the Internet, which the religious and social left and right benefitted in stirring emotions of their followers.

Organization such as, Animal Liberation Front (ALF (1)) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF (2)), as well as the religious leaders -- such as Pat Robertson, Kenneth Hagin, and Jerry Falwell were able to deploy their messages to the like minded. This is what the new technology of the twenty-first has wrought. The over saturation of information was beaten into a shape of a mushroom cloud -- ever expanding and radiating outward. Information of the digital marketplace devastates the political process polarizing it into the shambles of a shattered society.

Image from AP from the Daily Mail

The 24-hour news cycle, part of the digital marketplaces, allows for the fragmentation of information as displays of biases from news organizations slanting their particular propaganda for their viewers. Fox News and MSNBC, at the opposite end of political agendas, often clash.

This clash helps redeploy and reinforce the narrative of political polarizations in the digital marketplace. It also allows for political pundits, politicians, political operatives to appear on the perspective networks as informants to the public square. Yet, as revealed in a paper on climate change by Lauren Feldman, Edward W. Maibach, Connie Roser-Renouf and Anthony Leiserowitz, Climate on Cable: The Nature and Impact of Global Warming Coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, polarization is not a constant. Attitudes can shift. Rationalism, realism, obtainable facts can persuade once the isolation from polarized view points are exposed.

Populist movements whether  they are culture driven or technology driven or even driven by a charismatic leader tend amass on the eventuation of the pendulum coming to rest to its center. Essentially, culture writ-large finds itself returning to equilibrium. Finding a new level. Sometimes this resolutions comes in the form of regression, retracting, and collapsing unto itself or sometimes the resolution comes in a form of a new civil ceremony, advancing, co-opting, evolving to a new level of ascension.

At this point and time, the currents of history are in throes of expectation. These expectations are crystallizing and reaching an apex of credulity. A validation of the current displacement of loss -- a cultural malaise -- that is overwhelming and awaiting a resolution in its narration and redeployment (DVND). Adam Smith, an observer of the social and economics currents, understood that liberty, cultural movements are part of the social fabric which inhabit economic interests that returns to a "sane and balance treatment" of the conflicted by making "conscious" adaptations  along the way.

In the end, the extremes may have massive swings even torrential affects and effects on the cultural writ-large, but the eventual return to societal equilibrium will return..