The Convention Has Finally Become What It Always Was
For decades, political conventions have adapted to every indignity that progress and technology could throw at them.
Watching the first session of the world’s first live-streamed political convention last night, my mind kept returning to the late American historian Daniel Boorstin, and then to the equally late Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. (My mind has a broom closet where it keeps mid-20th-century public intellectuals.) Almost 60 years have passed since Boorstin coined the term pseudo-event, and nearly as long since McLuhan popped out with his own coinage, “The medium is the message.” Both phrases grew shopworn in the ensuing decades, but as the Democrats may show with their experiment in virtual conventioneering, some clichés endure because of their resiliency and usefulness.
Any modern political convention is a pseudo-event. Boorstin coined
