THE MULTI-CULTI OF KERRY:

The Pomo Primary: Postmodern candidates talk like handlers, and voters talk like pundits. (Andrew Ferguson, 03/15/2004, Weekly Standard)

THE NEW SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS did serve the salutary (and long overdue) goal of breaking down the division between journalist and voter; people who pay attention to pundits suddenly realized that anybody can be a pundit. Maureen Dowd is a pundit. Twenty years ago the futurist Alvin Toffler, a herald of postmodernism, predicted that pretty soon producers would become indistinguishable from consumers: Everybody, Toffler said, would be a "prosumer." And sure enough, in the hermetic world of politics, everybody--voter, pundit, reporter, consultant, politician, news junkie--has become a prosumer, consumer and producer all in one. [...]

It was even more obvious when the pundits of "Late Edition" took themselves as the subject of their own commentary. Of course, this year the echo chamber was enlarged to include bloggers, whose primary purpose seems to be self-reference, opinions about opinions, with Instapundit linking to a nugget from gasbag.com, who's riffing off a comment posted 40 minutes ago by the Bloviator in response to an insight posted 45 minutes ago on TwoWackos.net, which had been quoting Instapundit's thoughts on Bloviator's earlier post. The inbreeding has become so commonplace that even bloggers have stopped commenting on each other's comments about it.

In the pomo primary everybody was thinking like a pundit, especially voters. How else to account for the instant cliché of the season, "electability"? Since the first seeds of self-government sprouted in the Agora, this is surely the strangest rationale yet devised for choosing one candidate over another. Voters voted for someone because they thought voters would vote for him. It is second-order reasoning, a meta-rationale, a judgment about a judgment about a judgment. It will make your head hurt if you think about it too long.

Gosh, it's nice to have him back doing what looks to be an at least semi-regular gig at the Weekly Standard.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 6, 2004 12:39 AM