I recognize the psychological need to believe the American Republic will survive the coming four years, and I freely admit to being the biggest cynic in almost any room. But if the analogy is a shipwreck, we are already treading water with no ship or shore on the horizon. “Democracy lives in the people,” say the more hopeful pundits. Perhaps. But while it may be true that the spirit of personal liberty lives in the people, that is not the same thing as recognizing that the foundations of American democracy were rejected by the people.
Tomorrow, a man who showed violent contempt for the Constitution will repeat the oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and the flags decorating the very Capitol he attacked will lead many to think this is still the United States. It is not. Now begins the story of an ersatz America (an Idiots’ Interregnum) where the nation floats unmoored from the rationales for its own existence. The question, therefore, is not survival but revival. Can the Republic be restored after the electorate decides it no longer matters?
The first time Trump was elected, I argued that this represented a vote of no confidence in the Republic, and not only would I double down on that assessment today, I believe that same faithlessness has long been evident on the far left and the far right. MAGA claims to defend the Constitution and lies about its meaning while many young Progressives shrug at the Constitution as an anachronism not worth defending. Driving both sentiments is a dangerous level of constitutional illiteracy amplified by the so-called information age and weaponized by masters of the technology. When Madison et al. studied the fates of republics and democracies to learn what makes them fail, they could not have imagined a technology that would one day confound reality itself at the speed of light.
It is difficult in any society to distinguish policy from political theater, but the phenomenon is acutely frustrating in a nation this important, where the population knows more mythology than history. Trump personifies that illiteracy—a consequence of both classic illiteracy (i.e., a failure to teach) and cultural illiteracy (i.e., a loss of faith in core principles). In combination, these traits make a mockery of our sacred words, and when Trump takes the oath he already violated, the promise he apes back to the Chief Justice will be purely performative. If the President’s Oath of Office is just for show, whose oath matters? The implications, rippling out to the clerk of the smallest town in the smallest county, are toxic to a nation that was literally invented with words and kept by generations of Americans vesting those words with meaning.
The United States has always been a work of paradoxical genius. More than any nation, its identity is an idea expressed in highly intellectual terms securing the right of every citizen to remain blissfully ignorant about the underlying principles of that idea. The First Amendment, the Progress Clause, and the writings of the key founders all express a foresight that upholding the Constitution would require a broad literacy not easily attained by a whole nation. Today, that original paradox is manifest in the fact that immigrants seeking citizenship get better civics educations than most natural born citizens.
For the native citizen, we instill constitutional illiteracy at an early age with flashcard concepts that rarely mature as our students do. For instance, the short answer to the 2nd Amendment flashcard has always been “the right to bear arms,” a textual redaction eliding an important national security debate at the founding period that, if taught, would inform a richer understanding of history and the Bill of Rights. This needlessly controversial example begs the question as to whether Americans could ever have achieved core constitutional literacy without condemning that education as either “liberal indoctrination” or “white colonialist values.”
Not every American—indeed almost no American—is inclined to spend hours with The Federalist or comb through Elliott’s Debates or deep-dive into the classical education that informed the framers. But basic civics literacy does not require so much academic rigor. A fourth grader can understand, for example, the difference between the state censoring speech and a private party rejecting speech. But in recent years, law school graduates serving in Congress or working at “digital rights” organizations have willfully alleged speech censorship in contexts that are aberrations of the constitutional right.
Of course, we Americans often overstate ourselves with words like “patriot” or “traitor” when what we really mean is political agreement or disagreement. Occasionally, an adult steps up, as Senator McCain famously did during the debate with Senator Obama to correct a woman who called Obama a traitor. But that kind of dignity is now either forgotten or scorned. We have thrown open the Overton Window, defenestrated patriots like McCain, Gore, Pence, Liz Cheney, et al. in favor of seditionists, felons, lunatics, and the patently unqualified. And I will die on the hill arguing that the catalyst of this clusterfuck is the information age—not merely driven by profit, but by a mad, narcissistic ideology sold to the public as “freedom.”
The words that define and shape the United States are now about as meaningful as the hashtags and memes that have diluted both denotation and connotation in that “sea of irrelevance” called social media. For more than a decade, often “liberal” tech-utopians insisted that a wall of separation protected real life from the “Wild West” of cyberspace, assuring us that the worst aspects of the latter would not have any tangible effect on the former. To say otherwise was to earn the name “Luddite,” and there will be no apology from Big Tech’s evangelicals at EFF et al. A few Silicon Valley refugees offered their mea culpas the first time they noticed the experiment escaping the lab circa 2017, but those voices, like real Republicans, have been marginalized.
Now, the destruction wrought by the information age is holistic. With Senate confirmations of dangerously unqualified political hacks like Hegseth, Bondi et al., the disease of constitutional illiteracy is now its own mandate. Yes, the former GOP (whatever one calls it) is craven and cultish, but it could only have been led there because the idea of American democracy is indeed not alive in quite enough of the people. And because all death is brain death, the idea of America dies when too many people applaud empty slogans like “warrior culture,” rather than engage in adult conversation about what the military, or any department, actually does. This is where the digital revolution has led a great nation.
Real life now mirrors cyberspace, where fools become kings. And so, we are a silly, childish nation playing with dangerous toys. America is running with scissors, and the information age that brought us to this moment offers little more than a video clip of the toddler about to impale himself. If there had truly been an information revolution, then Trump would have been the civics lesson America needed instead of the civics test America failed. It was an easy test — i.e., don’t elect people who tried to overthrow the Constitution. But that’s what happened. And the fact that tens of millions of Americans don’t believe, or perhaps don’t care, that it happened is because the information age broke the Republic.
