In his clear-eyed 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that “the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug” were indelibly altering our cultural discourse, making it more trivial, more inconsequential, and rendering the information it conveyed “simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical, and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.”
“Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters,” Postman wrote, “need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship.”
By “electric plug,” Postman meant television, but his observations apply even more fittingly to the age of the internet, in which data overload ensures that it’s the shiniest object—the loudest voice, the most outrageous opinion—that captures our attention and receives the most clicks and buzz.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman compared the dystopian vision that Aldous Huxley mapped out in Brave New World (in which people lead soporific lives, deadened by drugs and frivolous entertainments) with the one Orwell created in 1984 (in which people live under the crushing autocratic rule of Big Brother).
“Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information,” Postman wrote. “Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
As Postman saw it, Huxley’s dystopia was already coming to fruition in the late twentieth century. While Orwell’s fears of a totalitarian state applied to the Soviet Union, Postman argued, the threat to the liberal democracies of the West—this was in 1985, remember—was better represented by Huxley’s nightmare of a population too narcotized by “undisguised trivialities” to engage as responsible citizens.
These observations of Postman’s were ahead of their time, and they would be echoed by George Saunders, who in an essay titled “The Braindead Megaphone” (2007) argued that our national discourse had been dangerously degraded by years of coverage of O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky. Our national language, he wrote, had become so dumbed down—at once “aggressive, anxiety-provoking, maudlin, polarizing”—that “we were sitting ducks” when it came time to try to have a serious debate about whether to invade Iraq, and all we had in our hands was “the set of crude, hyperbolic tools we’d been using to discuss O.J., et al.”: the shouted babblings of a loud know-it-all, know-nothing figure he called Megaphone Guy, bellowing into a bullhorn, its intelligence level set to “Stupid,” its volume stuck on “Drown Out All Others.”
But prescient as Postman’s observations about Huxley are (and as prescient as Huxley was about our new age of distraction), it’s clear that he also underestimated the relevance of Orwell’s dystopia. Or perhaps it’s the case that Trump and the assaults he and his administration have committed against the very idea of truth have made 1984 timely again—something readers recognized, propelling it and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism up the bestseller lists in the month that Trump took the oath of office.
Trump’s lies, his efforts to redefine reality, his violation of norms and rules and traditions, his mainstreaming of hate speech, his attacks on the press, the judiciary, the electoral system—all are reasons that the democracy watchdog group Freedom House warned that year one of the Trump administration had brought “further, faster erosion of America’s own democratic standards than at any other time in memory,” and all are reasons that Orwell’s portrait of an authoritarian state, in which Big Brother tries to control all narratives and define the present and the past, is newly relevant.
Trump often seems like a one-man set of Aesop-like fables—with easy-to-decipher morals like “those who lie down with dogs will get up with fleas” or “when someone tells you who he is, believe him”—but because he is president of the United States, his actions do not simply end in a tagline moral; rather, they ripple outward like a toxic tsunami, creating havoc in the lives of millions. Once he has left office, the damage he has done to American institutions and the country’s foreign policy will take years to repair. And to the degree that his election was a reflection of larger dynamics in society—from the growing partisanship in politics, to the profusion of fake stories on social media, to our isolation in filter bubbles—his departure from the scene will not restore truth to health and well-being, at least not right away.
Philip Roth said he could never have imagined that “the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters,” would appear in “the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon.” Trump’s ridiculousness, his narcissistic ability to make everything about himself, the outrageousness of his lies, and the profundity of his ignorance can easily distract attention from the more lasting implications of his story: how easily Republicans in Congress enabled him, undermining the whole concept of checks and balances set in place by the founders; how a third of the country passively accepted his assaults on the Constitution; how easily Russian disinformation took root in a culture where the teaching of history and civics had seriously atrophied.
George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 was eerily clairvoyant about the dangers America now faces. In order to protect its future, he said, the young country must guard its Constitution and remain vigilant about efforts to sabotage the separation and balance of powers within the government that he and the other founders had so carefully crafted.
Washington warned about the rise of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who might try “to subvert the power of the people” and “usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
He warned about “the insidious wiles of foreign influence” and the dangers of “ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens” who might devote themselves to a favorite foreign nation in order “to betray or sacrifice the interests” of America.
And, finally, Washington warned of the “continual mischiefs of the spirit of party,” which are given to creating strife through “ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” and the perils that factionalism (East versus West, North versus South, state versus federal) posed to the unity of the country. Citizens, he said, must indignantly frown “upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”
America’s founding generation spoke frequently of the “common good.” Washington reminded citizens of their “common concerns” and “common interests” and the “common cause” they had all fought for in the Revolution. And Thomas Jefferson spoke in his inaugural address of the young country uniting “in common efforts for the common good.” A common purpose and a shared sense of reality mattered because they bound the disparate states and regions together, and they remain essential for conducting a national conversation. Especially today in a country where President Trump and Russian and alt-right trolls are working to incite the very factionalism Washington warned us about, trying to inflame divisions between people over racial, ethnic, and religious lines, between red states and blue states, between small towns and big cities.
There are no easy remedies, but it’s essential that citizens defy the cynicism and resignation that autocrats and power-hungry politicians depend upon to subvert resistance. The inspiring students who survived the Parkland, Florida, massacre have done just that, rejecting the fatalism of many of their elders; by turning their grief into action, they are changing the national dialogue and leading the charge to get real gun control measures enacted that could help prevent others from suffering the terror and loss they experienced.
At the same time, citizens must look to—and protect—the institutions the founders created as pillars to uphold the roof of democracy: the three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—meant to serve as “reciprocal checks,” in Washington’s words, on one another; and the other two foundation stones of democracy that the founders agreed were crucial for creating an informed public that could wisely choose its leaders: education and a free and independent press.
Jefferson wrote that because the young republic was predicated on the proposition “that man may be governed by reason and truth,” our “first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.”
“I hold it, therefore, certain,” Jefferson went on, “that to open the doors of truth, and to fortify the habit of testing everything by reason, are the most effectual manacles we can rivet on the hands of our successors to prevent their manacling the people with their own consent.”
Madison, somewhat more succinctly, put it like this: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.” Without commonly agreed-upon facts—not Republican facts and Democratic facts; not the alternative facts of today’s silo-world—there can be no rational debate over policies, no substantive means of evaluating candidates for political office, and no way to hold elected officials accountable to the people. Without truth, democracy is hobbled. The founders recognized this, and those seeking democracy’s survival must recognize it today.