A lot of stuff you see as “unprecedented” has actually happened before

The obvious example that might pop for people is “OMG, Trump was an unprecedentedly bad President!” Maybe so, but Trump is essentially just Andrew Jackson for 2016–2020. (Or, hell, Andrew Johnson!) People with Trump would talk about Presidents and morals too, i.e. “being Presidential.” Well, many Presidents had secret girlfriends. Kennedy and LBJ were two of the more impactful Presidents of modernity in terms of influencing modern America, and … both pretty much hit on anything that moved, best we can tell. So is/was Trump unprecedented? In some ways, yes. In many other ways, he’s just the modern continuation of other trends we’ve seen.

Same vein: we talk about how it’s “unprecedented” that a small amount of people control the conscious public square narrative, i.e. in this case it’s Dorsey and Zuck, and Dorsey was (bad optics!) at a resort in French Polynesia during the Capitol riots. But as Kara Swisher explains on this episode of “The Good Fight” podcast, it’s always been like that: when TV was the essence of media, TV networks were largely controlled by 10–11 white guys who all lived in the same zip codes of Manhattan. It’s not an unprecedented situation so much as we just changed the zip code where the power emanates from.