Politico

For those who expect American politics to conform at least somewhat to the past two and a half centuries of history, the 2024 campaign cycle seems unsettling, an even stranger and more radical break than we’ve seen before. But if you look at what’s driving these changes — a transformed media landscape, the increasingly tenuous link between policy and public sentiment, a sea change in how pollsters track the American public — you can see that it’s not quite a break, but the emergence of a future that some have been living in for years.

James Pethokoukis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The Conservative Futurist,” compared the state of affairs to that predicted by the writer Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book “Future Shock,” which argued that societies experience profound disorientation when exposed to “too much change in too short a period of time.”

“He basically predicted that the pace of change and information would become so overwhelming that it would psychologically destabilize people,” Pethokoukis told DFD. “Looking at our current campaign, whether it’s social media or three-hour podcasts with candidates, it’s hard not to think Toffler was onto something with his concerns about information overload affecting society’s psychological well-being.”