Benjamin Franklin is said to have concluded, at the end of the 1789 constitutional convention, that it had created a “republic, if you can keep it.” The question now is whether the internet and social media have destroyed our “republican” form of government, and left us government by the mob. If so, the only solution is to reform the internet.
Looking back at Greek history, the authors of the constitution wrote in the Federalist Papers that in a direct democracy “passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason.” They added “had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob” led by a demagogue.
So they designed what they called a “republican” form of government. They put government in the hands of elected representatives who would assemble to resolve the nation’s conflicts. James Madison reasoned that the size of the country distanced representatives from their constituents’ passions. It also mitigated the danger of “factions” by putting together representatives of many different factions so that no one faction would control.
Until recently, the system has usually worked as intended. Congressmen operated at a distance, but what might be called “learned intermediaries,” a term used to describe a doctor’s role in prescribing drugs to a patient, bridged the gap. Those intermediaries included three national news networks subject to a fairness doctrine, local newspapers owned by businessmen with a stake in their communities, trade associations protecting the interests of their members, and other community groups. It was not too long ago that a Speaker of the House declared that “all politics is local.” Unions in one district, farmers in another, manufacturers in yet another all vied for national influence.
The internet and social media have now disrupted, if not destroyed, that structure. To the extent there still is a gap, constituents get their information from social media “influencers” who have no community investment and make money from selectively targeted extremism, the very “passions” the framers feared, not from the learned intermediaries of the past.
In addition, the social media has a national audience. Because it does, it is now possible for one “faction” to dominate national politics in a way that the people who wrote the constitution could not have imagined.
As a result, politics has become an entertainment industry. Every person now believes that he or she knows best because of what the internet told them. And what that person read was what entertained them most and they were most passionate about. That is what the algorithms were designed to provide. What matters is not policies, or facts, but who tells the most entertaining story.
Look at the recent presidential election. Policies did not matter. The Biden administration tamed the Covid-generated inflation. Unemployment fell to record lows. The United States gross national product grew and outpaced other nations. While the Biden administration deported fewer immigrants than the prior administration, it turned many more away at the border. In normal times, these would be signs of success. But that is not the way they were viewed.
Instead, entertaining lies won out over facts. President Trump did not win the 2020 election. There is no wave of criminal immigrants invading our country. Not only is there not a criminal wave, but illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than others because commission of a crime means automatic deportation. Tariffs add to the price of imported goods and are paid by those who buy them, not by their foreign manufacturers. In fact, if tariffs did not add to the price of imported goods, that would defeat their purpose, which is to make imported goods more expensive than those made in the United States.
The winner, President Trump, is someone who made his money as an entertainer playing a businessman on television and who obviously relishes that role. And now he wants a Fox TV host to be his Secretary of Defense.
If this is correct, then much of the commentary on the election is misguided. The problem is not the policies advocated by Democratic politicians. Policies that pay more attention to the needs of workers will have no effect. Blaming the resentment of “elites” actually makes things worse because many of the “elites” are the intermediaries who once moderated public discourse. And what needs saving is not “democracy” but the republican form of government that those who wrote the constitution intended.
It is tempting to say to the Democrats that their only alternative is to find a better entertainer. But that would not rescue representative government.
Perhaps a possible solution would be to reform the internet in ways that would encourage its more responsible use.
One step would be to make web companies responsible as publishers of the information they carry, unless they identify the source in a way that makes it possible to hold the source responsible for the message. Their present immunity, which is based on an analogy to the common carrier telephone company, was never intended for mass messaging. Forcing web companies to identify sources would also curb their ability to “scrape” information from publishers and use it as their own.
Doing this would at least help combat the internet’s ability to spread irresponsible falsehoods that fuel the passions of the mob. Also, the need to defend what is posted might boost the fortunes of the intermediaries who would inevitably have to be relied upon to prove what is true.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
