Does it matter that the Obama administration has conflated an agent of the media with a political party? Does mass media = political party? Is this a change in the topology or structure of the media?
Although I do agree that there is a conflation of Rush with the GOP, in many ways, he is representative, or, a representation in the absence of a grounding figure. In other words, Rush represents, and is a mouthpiece for, the kinds of anxieties the 2008 election gave rise to: potential loss of white centrality, unraveling of Reagan-economics, questioning of capitalism, reassertion of a liberalist and so forth. Rush manages to rationalize or make logical a kind of nostalgic hopefulness, a longing to return to a time "when things were better", which of course, never existed....but, instead, remediates a idealized and ideologically infused re-membering of a past that maintained the kinds of boundaries many of Rush's followers would like to keep in place.
Although I do agree that there is a conflation of Rush with the GOP, in many ways, he is representative, or, a representation in the absence of a grounding figure. In other words, Rush represents, and is a mouthpiece for, the kinds of anxieties the 2008 election gave rise to: potential loss of white centrality, unraveling of Reagan-economics, questioning of capitalism, reassertion of a liberalist and so forth.
ReplyDeleteRush manages to rationalize or make logical a kind of nostalgic hopefulness, a longing to return to a time "when things were better", which of course, never existed....but, instead, remediates a idealized and ideologically infused re-membering of a past that maintained the kinds of boundaries many of Rush's followers would like to keep in place.