The RNC was a terrifying trip into the Upside Down world for millions of Americans -- a pantomime quite grotesque to those who see Trump as an unmitigated calamity of meanness, racism and incompetence may, nonetheless, express reality as understood by many...

For those who read the NY Times or watch CNN, it was a channel flip into a world of alternate facts and narratives quite alien to their own, and yet, like well-written fantasy fiction, it's a complete world that makes its own kind of sense

Long before Facebook was a thing, my pal @poniewozik wrote 16 years ago about the political implications of how already proliferating digital media platforms created a burgeoning ability for Americans to curate their own realities http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,699790,00.html

The facts of the Trump era are quite different in different American media spheres -- and then there's the narrative. As Joe O'Neill warned and the conventions confirmed, the GOP is much better at offering a narrative than centrist Dems are https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/05/28/brand-new-democrats/

Benedict Anderson wrote of the nation (distinct from the state) as an "imagined community" -- a story, a narrative, rather than a materiality. Its emergence in Europe depended on the printing press -- the dissemination of the tools for imagining a 'national' community...

The imagining of an American 'nation' prolly depended more on cinema and the myths it popularized. Later TV. But cable, internet, social media means it's not hard to see why there's no longer a shared narrative binding Americans to a single imagined nation...

It's not only the facts of the Trump era that are not shared; the Trump presidency is a symptom of the fractured national identities and narratives reinforced by divergent information platforms. There's no common view held by citizens of what it means to be "American"

Trump opponents have reason to be anxious after the two conventions. Because the RNC was a reminder of how his message resonates with the constituency that voted him in, and also offered soothing messaging to those who like his policies even tho appalled by his style

And the extent to which the very structure of the US political system rigs the outcome in favor of white minority rule (Electoral College, Senate etc.) means that Trump's narrative need only resonate with a minority of the electorate to keep him in power.

Turnout will be key — will the narrative that Biden is a nice guy and listens be enough to inspire that turnout?