The fires consuming Australia, products
of record-breaking heat and drought, suggest an unwelcome alternative meaning
to the phrase advocating a month without alcohol. They are also a reminder that
the phrase’s intended expression of a yen for sobriety is far too narrow for
the times: booze may settle a steady fog on the nation's faculties but its
influence is nothing compared to the dizzy degradation brought by our
over-indulgence in garbage media and tribal politics. It's this, more than that
second martini, that's impairing our speech and reasoning, wrecking the
conversation required not only for responsible environmental stewardship but
democracy itself.
A quarter century ago, Francis
Fukuyama wrote that we were entering “the end of history,” a period in which
democracy would increasingly assert itself and overspread the earth. One reason
for this, he said, was the widening availability of information, which would
thwart the brainwashing and disinformation campaigns that dictatorships,
including populist dictatorships, had traditionally relied on. But that's not
quite how things turned out. Modern technology still allows the worst leaders
to significantly control information, and where information is openly available
it has been hyperdemocratized and weaponized by a billion tribalist partisans.
Since the FCC’s 1987 repeal of the
Fairness Doctrine, which had been quelling caustic on-air partisanship since
1949, we’ve experienced an unprecedented flood of sewage, first from talk radio
and television, and now, probably incurably, from the internet and social
media. By combining this flood with a political primary system that amplifies
the fringes, we’ve created a populist circus perfectly designed to excite the
very passions that the Founders worried would be our democracy’s downfall.