If you’ve spent anytime watching network television and have had the displeasure of listening at length to any liberal pundit, you may have noticed something in the seemingly insane rantings about the Russian election conspiracy; pundits seem to have no way to contextualize the current moment in American and World history. No matter what you think about the implications of Russian election interference, one thing that is incredibly clear to anyone who has studied history past what happened before November 8th, 2016, it is incredibly clear that interfering in elections is par for the course of American history, both our own democracy being bought out and the infliction of “US interests” on the democratically elected leaders of other countries. When place in the continuum of political power and struggle in the post Second World War era, Russia spending a few million dollars in an election campaign worth billions, “Russiagate” should be a relative blip on the radar of major political scandals. So then why has the liberal media become thrown into hysterics over the thought?

The first and most obvious answer to the question is that liberals were searching for a scapegoat to be used to shift blame away from their failure to hold on to government, which no doubt plays a role. But can that fully explain the cottage industry of insane conspiracy that has sprung up in the last year or so? I would propose another answer to the problem, that being that liberal pundits and liberals in general don’t know their history. When all of your intellectual efforts are focused on figuring out and completely understanding the now, you lose almost all perspective on how we got here and where we are going. Trying to analyze the present while only focusing on what’s directly in front of you is like trying to discern the plot of a movie while looking at a single frame of the film. Unfortunately for journalists and pundits in general, they are expected to only work in the now, to constantly have a comment for every headline that comes across the feed, they are almost constantly caught in the head space of the present. Debord describes this phenomenon somewhat in Society of the Spectacle,

“When ideology, having become absolute through the possession of absolute power, changes from partial knowledge into totalitarian falsehood, the thought of history is so perfectly annihilated that history itself, even at the level of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer exist. The totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present where everything that happened exists for it only as a place accessible to its police. The project already formulated by Napoleon of “the ruler directing the energy of memory” has found its total concretization in a permanent manipulation of the past, not only of meanings but of facts as well.”

This is something that I might describe as “Historical Object Permanence”, what narratives don’t exist directly in front of me don’t exist or are completely irrelevant. When we can’t connect our lives to history we lose the ability to make sense of our surroundings and to make predictions about the future. We are left to wander hopelessly through the foggy forest of time with nowhere to go. The pundit problem is exacerbated and projected beyond the class of conservative and liberal elites who fill up time slots on cable television in two ways. The first being that, no matter how much we pride ourselves on being a society of freethinkers and rationalists, we gather most of our opinions from the same pundit class described above. That means that we ourselves are caught up in the grips of the current, the “spectacle” as Debord describes it as pundits both decide what news we are subjected to as well as what the proper opinions on these events are.

The second problem is much more far-reaching and has to do with how are society is restructuring with the birth of mass media, specifically with social media and the internet. With social media we have been given the opportunity to project our thoughts into a vast web of data for others to see. Most people ruminating on the ways that social media has affected our politics have mostly focused on the speed at which we can obtain information, and the sheer volume which we can now consume on a daily basis. However, I think that the ways in which we express our political opinion has been even more drastically changed, and criminally under reported on. As the internet has become more of a fixture in the lives of most people in “developed” countries (and is becoming a major part of life for many people outside of that bubble), we have gained the ability to regularly talk to people outside of our locality and socioeconomic status. Before the internet, before mass media, how many people cared about the op-ed page of the New York Times, which has become a fixation for a significant portion of the country even outside of the bourgeois coastal bubbles? Political discussion before this time was focused on primarily the people you lived and worked with, which meant that you could easily categorize what someone’s political beliefs were based on their cultural and socioeconomic status. Now that access to information has been democratized in a way, and our economic lives are wholly disconnected from our social lives (how many people do you know that hang out regularly with their coworkers?), our politics have become scatterbrained. With the internet not only has information become more readily available, but commentary and punditry have also been democratized. Now anybody who can bang out an opinion on a keyboard or can record audio and video can send their thoughts out into the world and be heard by an audience much larger than anyone before the invention of the radio could have ever imagined. The unfortunate side effect of this is that if every man can become a pundit their own right, they too will suffer from the same nearsightedness that Rachel Maddow and other pundits suffers from.

There are a few ways that the nature of the internet could go from here. We live now in the “wild west” of the internet, but as corporations colonize the space more and more will we see a shift in the way that we engage with the past, the present, and the future? We will go back to the days of mass media punditry that ruled the discourse of the mid 20th century as control of information and speech becomes more concentrated in the hands of a few small companies, or will we hold onto our collective of individual voices? Whatever the future holds, I think it will probably require growing pains as we expand and grow to fit the new paradigm that the mass media has wrought on us.