The United States is Too Big For Patronage Systems

The dissolution of the mainstream media is an awesome thing to watch. On a daily basis, the audience of mass market TV shows shrinks as people wander off to do their own thing, at least as far as passive consumption of entertainment is concerned. The audience for news and opinion programs shrinks too and more people turn to the Internet for news and opinion because it's more immediate, interactive, and more interesting and edgy.

The parochial opinions of oligarchs and corporate heads find a limited audience outside their immediate circle of minions. It's even more apparent that their opinions are parochial when they attempt to enforce them via corporations, which are really feeble physical entities. Even a billion monies doesn't go very far compared to the scale of a country like the United States. Corporations like Apple that have many stock market monies are pretty unimportant and could disappear without affecting anybody too much.

The patronage glad handing political networks of oligarchy people tend to be centralized. In the United States they're really in New York and DC and now in the "tech" cities. The opinions and political ideas of the oligarchs and their minions are really particular to those areas and don't really seem to have much traction outside their geographical limits.

The Internet is even bigger, of course, and the monies and minions are even more diluted and less effectual.