Populism, Media Revolutions, and Our Terrible Moment

 

All right, we are going back to our roots! Let's takes notes on this video and see where it goes.

Hank starts with the history of mass media - which starts with Radio, although I would have started with the telegraph, as Tim Wu in The Master Switch does, but I digress. Radio is the first mass media, which is where we get the term 'broadcast', originally a farming term actually.

Then he talks about Father Coughlin (and he should have talked about Huey Long too) and how someone like FDR saw them as a threat and it was only due to Long dying before they were able to rise to power that we were able to get FDR's four terms and be part of the allies in WWII and all that.

Populism is a marketing strategy, not an ideology - This is why there is Left Populism and Right Populism and why, you know, populism is not a bad thing. No marketing strategy is a bad thing in itself. 

Now we move to the digital revolution and broadcasting became cheaper. (Maybe not actually cheap but that's neither here or there) and then we move onto the Printing Press, which was another revolution.

Hank talks about Martin Luther - Luther was a crass man, compared to the dogmatic Calvin or the rather meek Hus and so on... Luther is always interesting. My art historian really liked Cranach, who was a painter very close to Luther and a favorite of the Nazi to the point they stole a lot of his paintings.

He quotes Erasmus, who was the original Centrist or Reformist, yet a very influential man.

Populism is a marketing strategy, and therefore like Father Coughlin who started out as a leftist and had many leftist ideals but eventually his antisemitism started to took hold, the important thing about populism is that you need to hold with ideology. This is why Sanders wields populism so deftly.