Today, the Capitol is not fallen.
But it is much harder to say that the country’s democratic culture is not broken.
While a few thousand breached the walls, perhaps a hundred million more across the country quietly indulge the core fantasy that these attackers believe: that, because their president said so, a massive conspiracy took place to manufacture fake ballots for the Democratic candidate, and that American democracy has therefore functionally collapsed and must be resuscitated. That is the takeaway from public opinion polls that find that 70% of Republicans believe the election was stolen. This is whole cloth fantasy. They believe this in spite of every major media outlet denying it; in spite of the conclusions of Republican judges who have reviewed the total absence of evidence; in spite of the fact that the president’s own lawyers will not repeat the true scope of this lie in court, for fear of professional censure.
This is not the first time the country has fallen apart on common understandings of reality. It is merely the most telegenic fallout in recent times.
A country that cannot find a common understanding of reality at that scale cannot govern itself. It may lurch between elections that happen towards good or bad candidates, or towards a legislative consensus on this or that issue, but it remains vulnerable at any moment to the snowballing lie that tells us that water treatment plants are injecting mind-control drugs or the planet is not warming or our parties are ruled by lizard people or pedophiles or that an archly vain pathological liar on television is the only person you can trust.
The cause and the solution to this problem are quite simple. A generation ago, technology liberated every would-be propagandist to spread lies at a scale equal with the reach of the New York Times, and we embraced this revolution with a deeply naive belief that more speech was always better speech. There is now far greater bandwidth, and far more mind-hours, devoted to processing various strains of viral garbage than to real news. We wake up twitching with anxiety and we go to bed scrolling our phones. This is the mental disability we have inflicted on ourselves.
The country — and the world — needs a good dose of the unsympathetic editorial expertise that made America’s newsrooms the center of democracy in the 20th century. We need to understand that free speech is not an inalienable right to drown the airwaves in lies. While anyone can speak a lie if they like, we, as a culture, need to affirm that producing and disseminating mass media is a privilege that should have gatekeepers, and accept that this means we restrict our own access to these platforms in view of the common good. I don’t need this blog, or my facebook page, or a twitter, to be a whole and valued member of society with a voice. I should need to work hard and make connections and build credibility with them in order to have access to mass media. We need to relearn our respect for institutions and actors with real expertise, instead of valorizing the common guy who “does his research” by unwittingly and avidly reading sufficient quantities of garbage before hopping on Youtube and spewing his preferred fantasy into vulnerable minds.
One of the more sobering cultural shifts that we can trace to the birth of the internet, I fear, is that education itself (along with many other outdated forms of institutional authority) is no longer seen as a form of social capital. We seem to mildly distrust anyone with Dr. before their name, who spends too much time in the academies and not enough time making money or noise in the media. We vaguely look down on advanced degrees and valorize the doers and shouters who simply read enough of their twitter feed to see through the lies of the mainstream discourse and aren’t shy to tell you about them. This is a deeply toxic attitude, and a significant step backwards in our cultural development.
I dream that in a hundred years time, the term “social media” (or some gaggle of near-synonyms capturing what was unique about this time) will be rightly regarded as a toxic and naive aberrance in how society speaks to itself. That, yes, the telegram will be replaced by email; and a group chat can function just like a conference line; and the Arab Spring can still be spurred by an iPhone capturing video that couldn’t have been taken in the 20th century; but the wider internet will be restricted to a few well-regulated entities, like network television once was. We will build institutions and gatekeepers to regulate the quality of the content we feed on. In that world, we won’t lose hours worrying about our personal virtual influence, or doom-scrolling through the worst opinions and lies with unjustifiable platforms, or dripping away with dread at how society can be maintained with people of such absurd beliefs as we see all around us. We will, in return, give up the freedom to spend our time in ways that were mostly toxic to us. And our children will look back on this era with a deeper appreciation of an element of human nature: that all the “common sense” and inherent rationality we once presumed would guide an unbounded discourse towards ever deeper insight is, in fact, learned; can be unlearned; is deeply dependent on the quality of the discourse that surrounds it; so that the individual stands no better chance of discriminating between a thousand competing lies online than the feral wolfchild does of discerning which is the salad fork at a dinner party.
We need to agree on the uses and limits of free information, and build the walls that a society needs to have a coherent discourse.
Lacking that, a decent-minded president in a country where a third of the population believes in the lizard people theory remains constantly on the brink of dissolution. Last week, we saw a telegenic warning. One day, they will not be warnings.