Spiro C. Thiery » Thu Nov 02, 2017 8:40 am wrote:How about "9/11 so shocked Americans that it changed everything, leading them to acquiesce to all kind of..." While that may have been the (relatively enough) plausible scenario that presented itself, I know far too many people like myself who were anything but shocked and immediately quite opposed to everything that came after.
Yes, this is more in the vein of what is being argued by Schwartz. The hoax was not in the simulated Martian invasion fooling people out to grab their rifles and run into the street, which probably did not happen, but in the exaggerated claims afterward concerning how "the people" had reacted. The hysteria about the non-hysteria.
Now that you mention it, pretty much any post-election spin plays the same game. Soon as enough votes are counted (or "counted") to predict a certain result (or "result,") any notion of there having been a competition and coalition building between many voices is abandoned, the result is equated with some notional "center" or even a unified "people" or "America," and a hegemonic top-down interpretation of why this singular collective chose what it did is immediately laid on.
(This was obviously the case with Trump. Struggling, uneducated, disaffected, white, former steelworkers in Wisconsin -- the only voters who count, however notional -- having had enough of Clintons and the totalitarian societal dominance of Marxist identity politics, were seduced into voting for the "populist" "isolationist" "businessman" Trump by Russian fakenews memes on Facebook. Voila!)