Now, print culture in our Western cultural history gave rise to the great expansion of what Riesman describes as the inner-directed personality type.
Now, whatever else may be said about Donald Trump, he is not an inner-directed personality type. But he is also not a tradition-directed personality type.
Ah, but what about Riesman's third personality type, the other-directed personality type? Well, perhaps Donald Trump represents a dark version of the other-directed personality type, not the positive version of the other-directed personality type that Ong (1957, pp. vii and 39) holds out for and indeed seems to favor. (Later in the twentieth century, the Jesuits came to describe themselves as "men for others" - Riesman's other-directed personality type.)
As a dark version of Riesman's other-directed personality type, all personal interactions for the con-man Donald Trump are transactional. Indeed, he is not capable of having an i-thou relationship with another person. Moreover, Fareed Zakaria describes Trump as "so mercurial" and "so idiosyncratic" (p. 2).
Now, in Ong's "Preface" in his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (pp. 9-13), he says the following in the first sentence: "The present volume carries forward work in two earlier volumes by the same author, The Presence of the Word (1967) and Rhetoric Romance, and Technology (1971)." He then discusses these two earlier volumes.
Then, Ong says, "The thesis of these two earlier works is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: the works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explain everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, the thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish" (pp. 9-10; my boldface).
Major cultural developments include the rise of modern science, the rise of modern capitalism, the rise of representative democracy, the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts.
In the shorthand terminology that Fareed Zakaria and Ezra Klein use, social and political liberalism are major cultural developments in our Western cultural history.
For a critique of modern neoliberalism in our Western cultural history, see the lay American Catholic economist Anthony M. Annett's article "The Theology of Social Democracy: Catholic social teaching guides us beyond neoliberalism" in the lay-sponsored Catholic magazine Commonweal (2024).
For another relevant critique of neoliberalism in our recent Western cultural history, see the lay Italian philosopher Massimo Borghesi's book Catholic Discordance: Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis (2021).
Now, in effect, Ong implicitly works with this thesis in his massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958), mentioned above - his major exploration of the influence of the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in the mid-1450s. Taking a hint from Ong's massively researched 1958 book, Marshall McLuhan worked up some examples of his own in his sweeping 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (sic), mentioned above.
Now, after Ong's massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue about print culture in our Western cultural history was published in 1958, Ong subsequently came to make the crucial differentiation of what he termed primary oral culture from what he termed secondary oral culture.
For Ong, what he termed primary oral culture featured what he came to refer to as orally based thought and expression - before the impact of phonetic alphabetic literacy in ancient Hebrew culture and in ancient Greek culture. See Ong's 1982 summative book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (esp. pp. 36-57).
I have discussed Ong's account of orally based thought and expression in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word at length in my article "Walter Ong and Harold Bloom Can Help Us Understanding the Hebrew Bible" in Explorations in Media Ecology (2012).
Now, the most prominent historical events that Fareed Zakaria and Ezra Klein explicitly discuss are the following: "the open international system that the United States and Europe have built over the last eight decades" (p. 3), "After World War II" (p. 4), "the relationships that you had built over eight decades" (p. 5), "They [the Germans today] don't have any industry in the digital economy" (p. 7), "But the idea that we can go back to 1950 is just nuts" (p. 7), "Western liberal ideas and ideology" (p. 13), "Western liberal ideas" (p. 13), "Western-style, capitalist, liberal democracy" (p. 13), "Westernization" and "liberalism" (p. 13), "Western liberalism" (p. 14), "the rule of law and individual rights and individual liberties" (p. 15), "the rise of liberalism in Europe after the revolutions of 1848" (p. 16), "this godless, reckless liberty and liberalism that is engulfing the world [today]" (p. 16), "the last 30 years by the forces of globalization and liberalism" (p. 24).
When Fareed Zakaria and Ezra Klein refer to "Western liberal ideas and ideology," they mean Western political liberalism and Western economic liberalism - both were major cultural developments in the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
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