Seven Red

I’m a little too busy right now to deal with this in detail, but I find the rhetoric of McCain/Palin’s “unhinged” crowds to be a very interesting development indeed, and one that deserves a careful tracing. It is, no doubt, more media narrative than “representation” of any change in GOP rallies, but its a curious narrative to deploy at this point. Ever since palin came out with her asinine “pals around with terrorists” jibe we’ve been treated to a LeBonesque contemplation of the crowd mind, all with a special focus on the “rabid” McCain/Palin rallies. Of course, this whole election season has been a study in crowd rhetorics, from the Hillary camp’s desperate insinuation that the Obama supporters were a “cult” to the cringingly stupid and tone deaf “celebrity” ads that McCain’s more retrograde advisors decided to go with in August (like everything else, they boomeranged on the painfully out-of touch McCainites when he picked the ultimate substanceless “celebrity” in Sarah Palin).

I’ll just suggest here, with the (no doubt fruitless) promise of picking the point up later, that we’re seeing the return of the classical 19th century crowd image at precisely the moment that the so-called “wisdom of crowds” – which was always, for James Suroweicki and his various disciples, merely synechdoche for the orderly operation of free markets in the Chicago School style – at precisely the moment when the wisdom of crowds, I say again, is collapsing at 20% a week. So what do we see emerge at once, during the same week?

1. Panic on the financial markets, the collapse of the “wisdom of crowds” mantra that was always Friedmanite rational choice theory dressed up in a really laughable costume of physics.
2. Atavistic irrational rage of the McCain/Palin mobs as they froth and sway across the media spectrum.

These are not unconnected narratives.

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