Left Implosion: Has Twitter Made Democracy Impossible?

When I saw this full page ad in The New Republic when it came in the mail today, I knew the comprehensive defeat of liberal ideas was at hand. One can nit pick about the time frame but when liberals are asking themselves if something as freedom enhancing as Twitter can be the demise of democracy, their end has already arrived. They simply don't know it.

Brittle ideology is brittle but isn't it rather early to throw in the towel on democracy because of a social media network that limits any single contribution to 140 characters or less? Is the Obama post-mortem this easily scheduled and by asking a deadly, revealing question? Even if Obama squeaks out a win, the left seems spent, adrift and dissatisfied with itself. The latter is a new development.

I already wrote that Twitter effectively destroyed the Fourth Estate, regardless of how long that takes to play out. Click here to read possibly my best received blog post to date.  Recently, a reporter from a local news outlet in the Twin Cities said on Twitter that she had "never been prouder to be a member of the Fourth Estate." It was left to me to reply: "We're all members now; hate to be the one to break it to you."

Naturally, then, it is democracy that is destroyed next by Twitter after it obliterated media as we used to know it. I should have seen this coming.

Except one can only empathize so long with opposing political views in the teeth of complete chaos and incompetence by the president. By now the left and their clones in media and academe have disgraced themselves into a corner with their transparent, shameless shilling for him. Trapped, they attack the medium of their own self-exposure. They're not stupid; they're just clueless. Don't ask me what the difference is.

Yet here, however, regarding democracy they are dangerous because they are so wrong about the subject matter. How do I know when the panel hasn't happened yet? Because it takes no great imagination to suggest that the shortness of Twitter will be the focus. The shortness of Twitter is only half the story: the other half is its ability to shape to the point of killing media narratives.

Ergo liberals necessarily must equate Twitter with the end of democracy because it fatally undermines the idea of a Fourth Estate. How can democracy flourish in the face of wrong opinions and ideas? Media exist to promote one and only one: liberalism. Feel free to call it progressivism. In fact, it's rather big of the left and their media allies to allow for multi-party freely contested elections.

Conservatives will smirk at this panel and its overheated suggestion that Twitter imperils--rather than advances--democracy. They should not. One abiding thing we know about liberals is how very deeply they take themselves. It's a burden that comes with always being right.

I wouldn't mind getting to NYC and attending this panel presentation. I already dress mostly in black so that's half the battle with this crowd. I could practice walking around without an expression of astonishment at what I was hearing. Total focus on the person speaking to me to reaffirm their self-importance: that's the ticket for schmoozing this scene.

I shouldn't joke, really, because the question, even to be posed, represents a tombstone over the grave of liberal ideology. This is as it should be: it spent these last four years on its deathbed.

Let the dead bury the dead.