The 2024 election conclusively proved something we really should have known since 2016: America’s gatekeepers have failed.
The premise of “gatekeeping” as a political enterprise is that there is a mainstream consensus that can be enforced by institutions designed to protect it. It does not work by direct violent repression, but by platforming and avoiding certain ideas, people, movements and the like.
Gatekeeping, when successful, involves a set of recognized authority figures declaring that something is off-limits – and then that thing actually being delivered to the edge. No politician would engage with it, no talk show host would give it a respectful hearing, and only a small number of citizens heard it. Consider how, after 9/11, almost everyone agreed that a conspiracy about the attacks was theoretically reprehensible.
Trump’s victory is proof that gatekeeping doesn’t really work anymore. Immediately after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, there was a brief moment when leaders across the political spectrum agreed that Trump was too dangerous to be allowed to remain in politics — and even tried to oust him. In a January 8 email, Rupert Murdoch wrote that “Fox News [is] Too busy pivoting… We want to make Trump a non-person.”
Yet Murdoch failed, turning almost immediately to pro-Trump coverage. Every other attempt to relegate Trump to political non-existence has met with similar failure.
It’s not just a Trump thing.
His key allies and messengers – such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and Steve Bannon – have all been abandoned or blacklisted to varying degrees. X/Twitter suffers from a post-mask Falling advertising revenueLiberal musician Pull their music from Spotify Bannon spent just four months in federal prison to pressure the streaming giant to drop Rogan (For good reason) none of these techniques consistently reduced the effect of these statistics.
Even a famous person fails to deplatforming things.
I’ve written extensively and repeatedly about the influence of obscure radicals in the mainstream Republican Party—how, for example, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance clearly cites someone who openly wants to overthrow American democracy as a key influence on his thinking about the executive branch. I’m hardly the only one: an entire cottage industry of journalism is devoted to finding links between true extremes – Internet weirdness. Names like Bronze Age Pervert — and the Republican mainstream.
Such links are no longer hidden, but open. Yet, with few exceptions, such reporting does not seem to have suffered, and it sometimes helps the targets of the gatekeepers’ ire by raising their profile.
Time and time again, we’ve seen the Gatekeepers’ attempts to turn their enemies into oblivion fail. And I think it has a lot to do with a misanalysis of power—specifically, a failure to realize how far devoted followers can go in the 21st-century political-media environment.
Trumping the gatekeepers
In the past, the American mainstream consensus was enforced through bipartisan political agreement and dominated by elite institutions through a cultural apparatus: a shared norm in that environment that helped define the rules of the political game. If you break those rules, either (for example) Insulting soldiers or special ethnic groupsYou risk electoral defeat or even banishment from polite public life.
Trump’s rise to power in 2016 and the political resurgence of 2024 help us see why political or cultural elites can no longer enforce their old rules.
Whoever leads one of the two major parties already has a baseline voter floor of about 46 to 47 percent. The most important voters in deciding general elections are swing voters. In a highly polarized country with two very different parties, swing voters tend to be people who by definition do not have very strong partisan preferences, seeing both parties as possible alternatives.
Candidates like Trump who enjoy the unified support of a major party cannot really be gatekeepers. They are by definition part of the mainstream, and thus potentially electable thanks to the fundamental gravity of a two-party political system.
All of this raises the question: How is it that Trump, an extremist, was able to seize control of the Republican Party in the first place?
For reasons I have documented extensively, including in my book responsive spiritTrump was able to forge a direct bond with a critical mass of GOP primary voters rooted in shared discontent and fear. These voters, like Trump and unlike Democratic partisans, largely resented any elite attempts to gatekeep him — either from the cultural mainstream or even the Republican Party’s alternative elites, who tried and failed to stop his initial rise to power in 2016. .
In other words, Trump short-circuited the gatekeeping powers of both the Republican Party and the mainstream media.
After January 6, when some Republican elites tried to break with Trump again, they faced a massive backlash from their base. Three days after his “no-person” email, Murdoch was taking things back – telling his son Lachlan that “we have to lead our audience, which is not as easy as it sounds.” Fox viewers actually forced its CEO to board the Trump train.
So it’s Trump’s personal support, his massive following, that gives him and aligned Republicans the strength to resist the gatekeepers.
The death of the old political-media order
There’s more. The changing media landscape has allowed its allies in the cultural space to survive and even thrive for the same reason.
In the past, building a mass media enterprise was difficult enough that only a handful of people—those who managed television stations and mass newspaper distribution networks—could do it. Today, anyone can find fans on social media and work to monetize that following Given direct access to a wider audience, unpopularity among cultural gatekeepers is far less of a concern than it once was.
Joe Rogan has millions of fans; Those fans love him a lot more than those who try to make listeners feel bad for enjoying his show. Steve Bannon’s War room The show is Trump is super popular among the faithfulAnd remained so despite (or perhaps because of) the prison. Nick Fuentes’ weird and creepy fans don’t really care if the mainstream media calls them weird and creepy for stanning Nazi incels. All enjoy a level of influence and power because of their ties to Republicans who are unwilling to be ashamed of said connections.
This fragmented landscape means that there is not enough cultural integration to really exclude anyone from the discourse. When Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, Many are surprised Why it took them so long: It was Fox who held onto power, his unpopular but increasingly difficult staff. Yet Carlson’s post-Fox trajectory — Twitter/X — has been a successful turn to broadcast Won a seat next to Trump at the Republican National Convention — reveals that even the Murdoch empire could not rule out one of Carlson’s loyal followers.
Even if one doesn’t have the personal draw of Carlson or Rogan, there are establishments dedicated to serving more extreme audiences who are willing to hire you. If you get “cancelled” on a mainstream outlet, you can go to Fox. If you wait Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network.
To be clear, there are benefits to ending gatekeeping. By concentrating power among a small number of people and institutions, the old consensus encouraged groupthink, which resulted in, for example, mass cheerleading for the 2003 Iraq War. The age of gatekeeping was also meaningfully less democratic, as it gave elites more power than the people to set the terms of public debate. The creator economy, for all its flaws, empowers citizens to financially empower what they believe to be unfairly cut out of public life.
Yet those faults are undoubtedly immense.
Donald Trump, a man who literally incited riots in the Capitol and publicly vowed to attack Democratic institutions in his second term, was president-elect largely — if not primarily — because he built a following that allowed him to short-circuit elite gatekeepers. . between both parties. And the gatekeepers, for all their faults, adhere to basic standards of evidence and decency that cannot be enforced in our new political-media environment. Does anyone really think this country is better off now that someone like Fuentes has got the juice Safe dinners with once and future presidents?
Regardless of how you evaluate these trade-offs ideologically—which I think point to thorny conceptual problems for liberalism itself—we need to be clear about where we are empirically. And the truth is that Trump and allied Republican extremists cannot be criticized for their apparent defeat. Musk can’t be shamed into directing X more responsibly or ignoring Rogan into political oblivion.
Their opponents need new strategies.
