The Elite Panic of 2022 | City Journal
Three days after the mask mandate was struck down, on April 21, Barack Obama delivered the bad news about disinformation to a Stanford University forum on that subject. His unacknowledged theme, too, was the crisis of elite authority, which he explained with a history lesson. The twentieth century, Obama said, may have excluded women and people of color, but it was a time of information sanity, when the masses gathered in the great American family room to receive the news from Walter Cronkite and laugh over I Dream of Jeannie and The Jeffersons. Those were the days when a shared culture could operate on a shared set of facts.
The digital age has battered that peaceable kingdom to bits. Obama seemed unaware of the argument he was making, but it boiled down to this: the rise of social inclusiveness has opened the door to political chaos. As in the Judge Mizelle flap, the question, asked only tacitly, was who had the authority to make projections and recommendations.
Online, everyone did. People with opinions that the former president found toxic nationalists, white supremacists, unhinged Republicans, Vladimir Putin and his gang of Russian hackers could say anything they wished on the Web, no matter how irresponsible, including lies. A defenseless public, sunk in ignorance, could be deceived into voting against enlightened Democrats.
Total blindness to the other side of the story is a partisan affliction that Obama makes no attempt to overcome. At Stanford, he never mentioned the most effective disinformation campaign of recent times, conducted against Trump by the Hillary Clinton campaign, in which members of his own administration participated. He simply doesn t believe that it works that way. Disinformation, for him, is a form of lèse-majesté any insult to the progressive ruling class.
How are we to deal with this tumultuous, dangerous moment in history ? Obama was clear about the answer: we must recover the power to exclude certain voices, this time through regulation. The government must assume control over disorderly online speech. First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech don t apply to private companies like Facebook and Twitter, he noted. At the same time, since these companies play a unique role in how we . . . are consuming information, the state must impose accountability. The examples he provided betray nostalgia for a lost era: the meat inspector, who would presumably check on how the algorithmic sausage is made; and the Fairness Doctrine, which somehow would be applied to an information universe virtually infinite in volume.
Lots of people are saying this now. Evidently they are not thinking they might be among those excluded from speaking their minds. It’s very distressing. Some of us are constitutionally incapable of keeping our mouths shut and so this would put us in trouble.