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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

And enforcement cannot work if you’ve captured all three estates.

Did you mean this in the French Revolution sense (the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners) or in the American sense (the legislative, judicial, and executive branches)?

The French Revolution sense would be an ironic counterpoint, because the Revolutionaries did end up capturing all three estates, only to fall to someone (Napoleon) who captured the military, which wasn't considered one of the "three estates" because at the start of the French Revolution destroying civil society, enacting a military dictatorship, and starting a series of wars throughout Europe was considered outside the Overton Window.

This perhaps holds some lessons for America today.

I think there is a layer of truth to the idea that MAGA captured what England would call the Fourth Estate, the News Media.

England is weird because its model looks like that French model, except that it intertwines the nobility and clergy. Basically an Archbishop and a Earl both sit in Parliament as Lords, while the Commoners control only the Commons of the Parliament. Now today the Commons runs things, but that's relatively modern, in the 19th Century it was completely normal for the Prime Minister to be a Lord, and while some of them were only technically Lords, having in fact been elected but just also nobility anyway for one reason or another, or being ennobled while serving as PM because nobody thought that was a bad idea - others were never elected at all.

So weirdly the place which came up with the "Fourth Estate" only really had two other estates, although everyone reading will have known about the French concept too.

In the era when Lords routinely become PM (it would still be legal to do this today, but it's hard to imagine it happening, although the Tories did give a Lord one of the Great Offices of State so never say never) almost all those Lords were born into it. Today basically nobody sat in the Lords was born to it (there are about two dozen left, when they die or retire that's the end of it) but there are still always a dozen or so bishops, and Iran is ironically the only other place [except the Vatican which barely counts] where religious leaders are in government by fiat in the modern world...

Edited to mention the Vatican before somebody else does.

MAGA has captured the media, if not entirely by design, but entirely in practice.

Thanks to a combination of attacks from the executive, attacks from the oligarchs (Buy a paper and fire everyone who says things you don't like), or the simple fact that sane-washing MAGA insanity sells papers, the 'independent' press is everything but.

It is non-stop carrying water for the most insane lunacy, and is trying to convince us that it is fine and normal and desirable.

So I find claims that MAGA (or any other group) has captured the media to be self-contradictory: if they actually had, you would not be writing that, and I would not be able to read it. By definition. Capturing the media means that there is only one official narrative, and the population is completely unaware of anything outside of that narrative. Like the period from ~1950-1995, where you had the big 3 TV networks, and then each city had their own newspaper that basically owned a local monopoly, and they all basically printed/aired the same stories and same viewpoints.

IMHO what we're actually seeing is a huge fragmentation of the 4th estate. There is now a viewpoint on the Internet for everything, no matter how insane. That's part of what people don't like about it. This fragmentation of media has allowed airtime for MAGA views that would've been considered far outside the Overton Window just a decade ago, but that was the point of the Internet. And it's not really to the exclusion of other views, it's just that you have to go looking for the other views.

I find the definition that unless the capture is 100%, it isn't actually capture to be absurd.

Any strong, independent media ecosystem would not be so consistently sane-washing the firehose of crazy that we're being hit with every week, or kowtowing with such regularity.

Yes, you can find some obscure blog that will broadcast literally any cherrypicked viewpoint. That's not the majority of the media consumed in this country. Even when the owners of the networks differ, the message they broadcast is incredibly homogeneous.

No. Firstly no, the Network is just that, it's technology, you're describing culture, and the culture is a choice made by people of how to use that technology.

But also, this idea that somehow now that one guy who believes San Francisco doesn't exist is "media" whereas in 1990 he's not is insane. That's a choice you've made to re-define "random crazy people" as media, the Internet didn't do that. If anything changed magically in 1995 it's how you defined what does or doesn't count as media.

The MSM doesn't count as much because of social media noise and paywalls. One could always control the narrative with tweets written in caps with multiple exclamation signs that the MSM reproduces and amplifies for fun and prifit.

Ironic is claiming that Napoleon destroyed civil society, when his reforms are in many ways the foundation for modern civil society. Rule of law, national public education, the concept of a national bank, formation of the middle class, and so on. To say that Napoleon destroyed civil soceity is just plain wrong, Napoleon founded modern civil society.

To be fair, he (the national assembly really) stole the whole "all men being equal" and all the ideas on accessible readable law thing from the Dutch after the Dutch "joined" the French Republic. It's also very likely that Napoleon would've turned out like any other despot if he had held power longer.

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