“Man. . . I Wish We Could Just Have A Normal Human Being As President”

Elon Musk explained the basic problem in a CNBC interview last night: the sitting President of the United States is a hybrid of a hologram and Louis XVI. This echoes an interview he gave Tucker Carlson last month, not long before Carlson was airbrushed from the picture:

“I would prefer, frankly, that we put just a normal person as president, a normal person with common sense and whose values are smack in the middle of the country, just center of the normal distribution and I think that they would be great,” Musk told Tucker Carlson of Fox News in an interview which aired on the cable network on Tuesday.

But isn't this just a sideways explanation for the Bud Light phenomenon? Bud Light decided to privilege an unarguably not-normal person as its brand spokestrans, and the normal distribution staged a revolt. But none of the marketing experts who've tried to deliver explanations has come close to the real point: yes, beer is a working-class drink. Yes, working-class guys don't identify with trans, and in fact, they're acutely aware now that if someone sees them with a Bud Light, people will think they're gay.

But the real point is what political analysts have understood since the 1972 election, the working class has left the old New Deal coalition. That's the real lesson of Bud Light, and for that matter now Miller Lite: college-educated women aligned with Ivy League wealth are running their ad campaigns, and the Ivy shareholders are hoping Joe Sixpack won't notice, or well, er, if he noticed, maybe it'll all blow over.

Thus we have Newsweek's current take -- but let's look at the current Newsweek:

In 1937, News-Week merged with the weekly journal Today, which had been founded in 1932 by future New York Governor and diplomat W. Averell Harriman, and Vincent Astor of the prominent Astor family. As a result of the deal, Harriman and Astor provided $600,000 (equivalent to $11,310,000 in 2021) in venture capital funds and Vincent Astor became both the chairman of the board and its principal stockholder between 1937 and his death in 1959.

. . . During 2008–2009, Newsweek undertook a dramatic business restructuring. Citing difficulties in competing with online news sources to provide unique news in a weekly publication, the magazine refocused its content on opinion and commentary beginning with its May 24, 2009, issue. It shrank its subscriber rate base, from 3.1 million to 2.6 million in early 2008, to 1.9 million in July 2009 and then to 1.5 million in January 2010—a decline of 50% in one year. Jon Meacham, Editor-in-chief from 2006 to 2010, described his strategy as "counterintuitive" as it involved discouraging renewals and nearly doubling subscription prices as it sought a more affluent subscriber base for its advertisers.

In otrher words, Newsweek itself, much like the Democrat party with which Averell Harriman was closely identified, moved from a populist coalition aligned with post-Civil War robber baron wealth, to trying to appeal to a much smaller, much more upscale market. So this is its account ot the current state of the Bud Light rebellion:

A photo of cases of Bud Light sitting untouched on the shelves of a CVS in Florida has gone viral on social media, as furor aimed at the beleaguered beer brand continues.

Over the past several weeks, Bud Light has been the focus of a divisive debate after the company sent transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney a personalized beer can.

In fact, it's been seven weeks, and the decline in sales for Bud Light has been disastrous. The marketing and demographic experts are calling it a working-class phenomenon. Newsweek is tiptoeing around that question, it's just a "divisive debate", while poor Bud Light is "beleaguered". I doubt if Averell Harriman ever drank much beer, but he knew the rail workers and working-and-middle-class Americans who'd built his family fortune and rode his trains, and as a politician and diplomat, he was acutely aware of the Marxist-Leninist threat. (He was the force behind George Kennan's Long Telegram.)

Newsweek continues,

In an apparent demonstration of the conservative boycott's effect on Bud Light sales, far-right internet troll and Capitol rioter Anthime "Tim" Gionet recently took to Twitter to share an image from a CVS pharmacy in West Palm Beach.

. . . Gionet—who according to court documents pleaded guilty last July for his part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—responded to the tweets regarding Bud Light's apparent struggling sales by writing "keep it up."

Similar photos and videos have gone viral on social media in recent weeks, as boycotters seek to illustrate the purported success of their aversion to Bud Light.

So Newsweek characterizes a phenomenon that's almost universally characterized as working-class and populist as "far right" and connects it with January 6 -- which is to say, Donald Trump. This is simply an acknowledgement that the working class has left the Democrat coalition, while the Democrats are happy to say good riddance. Elon Musk as a rich guy who at least understands balance sheets, maybe a little like Averell Harriman, isn't sure about this.

If you've lost touch with the normal distrubution, something's wrong. For now, people are thinking Donald Trump, whatever his flaws, understands and personifies the normal distribution,for all its own flaws. Biden, at least for now, doesn't even seem quite human.

How does DeSantis fit in here? We'll have to find out.