I’ve long been skeptical that we, as a people, can recover from the catastrophe we now face. Most think that catastrophe is Donald Trump. I certainly believe Donald Trump is a catastrophe, but the catastrophe we face is deeper. And to cure it, if indeed it can be cured, we must work through its layers.
One layer is the corruption of money. A necessary but not sufficient condition for curing our deeper catastrophe is to end the corrupting influence of money in our politics. That’s possible, and we might be on the edge of a critical breakthrough, but even that breakthrough won’t be enough.
Because even deeper and profoundly more consequential is the corruption caused by engagement-based media. Cable news and social media render us inherently and unavoidably incoherent as a people. They profit by turning us into ignorant people who hate each other, and through this business model, they’ve earned endless profit. Solving the corruption of money won’t solve this. Given the extremism of the First Amendment, it’s not even clear we have the constitutional authority to solve this. But even if we did, there’s a third layer to our catastrophe that I’ve become convinced we must solve as well. And this layer, surprisingly (given my brand is pessimism), we could solve. At least, I think I’ve glimpsed a way.
