By contrast, blog posts and articles in online newspapers and magazines are not flow media; they are digital extensions of the kind of political writing that characterized printed newspapers and journals in the 19th and 20th centuries. There might be an opportunity for the readers to comment at the end of the article, but their responses do not contribute to flow and engagement in the same way. Even formal news and commentary often decays into flow fodder, such as when people post gut-feel responses to social media about articles they haven’t even read, based on the headline alone.

The politics of flow now poses a serious challenge to the earlier tradition of political debate. Some pundits have interpreted Trump’s populism as a realignment of the traditional political narratives of the left and the right. In both his presidential campaign and his presidency, Trump showed how easy it was to break both narratives into incendiary fragments that could be reshuffled into a variety of combinations. From the left he took opposition to international trade agreements and economic globalism; from the right, hostility to social programs and the federal bureaucracy (“drain the swamp”). On health care he managed to borrow from both left and right simultaneously, implying that he could repeal Obamacare (as conservatives fervently desired) and yet somehow replace it with something better and universal (that liberals had hoped for). He promised tax cuts and a large infrastructure program at the same time.

This was not a coherent agenda, but it works as a tweetable series of promises. Yet it was compelling to much of the American electorate, who no longer seemed to care about the coherence of political rhetoric. What mattered was that these promises all felt gratifying in the moment, addressing the feelings of grievance and betrayal that some citizens shared with Trump himself. That’s also why it doesn’t matter if the promises were kept, or if they contradicted with one another.

Trump’s opponents have had a hard time adjusting to this new order. In her 2016 campaign, Clinton was stymied by Trump’s unlikely candidacy and kept vacillating between presenting her complex agenda and attacking his lack of fitness for office. Trump has doubled down on flow politics since the election, tweeting thousands of times since his inauguration in 2017. The television and print-news media now broadcast and publish his and other politicians’ tweets, which they rarely did in the Obama years.

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Flow isn’t just for conservatives, either. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rise demonstrates that the politics of flow has a home on the left, too. AOC’s progressive agenda may be more coherent than Trump’s, but she is just as effective on Twitter. Like Trump, she understands how to use the platform to mobilize her 4 million followers in the moment. Last November, for example, she responded to a Fox News report on “radical new democratic ideas” by tweeting, “Oh no! They discovered our vast conspiracy to take care of children and save the planet.” Trump has many times more followers, but AOC’s tweets generate far more engagement (retweets, likes) per follower. When she arrived in Congress last year, AOC even gave a tutorial for fellow Democrats on the use of Twitter to connect with constituents.