Liberal commentator Andrew Sullivan doesn’t like the new media world. He remembers, back when he was editor of The New Republic in the 1990s, the business manager clearing his throat at a meeting and asking

What did we think we were going to do about this new thing called the Internet? If discourse went online, as everyone seems to think it will, what would happen to the magazine?

Good question, Sullivan replied: “if the web was what it seemed to be, then magazines would surely cease to exist.”

Because, he realized, “if images and video could be as accessible online as words, they would always win any contest for eyeballs,” and he wondered “how a literary and political magazine could adjust to the web… except as a peripheral, minor preserve of a few.”

What I failed to consider was how this would have a huge cultural and thereby political effect that would shake the reasoning and deliberating foundations of liberal democracy.

Guess where this is leading to? Of course, President Trump’s speech at the UN!

…a series of unconnected rants and digressions, baseless assertions and unseemly insults, a stream of addled and angry consciousness with no real relationship to coherence, or reason, or persuasion.

Sounds exactly like a mostly peaceful protest by a busload of paid lefty activists in front of an ICE facility!

To Sullivan, the internet revolution is what made Trump possible.

A post-literate president rose through the irrational, emotive Twitter revolution, with social media simultaneously making it hard to gain any perspective, overcome any emotional trigger, or concentrate for more than a couple of minutes.

All this was written on Sullivan’s online Substack account The Weekly Dish. An annual subscription is $50.

For Andrew Sullivan, the problem with the new age is the decline of “deep reading.” No more “actual history,”  no more “serious religious faith.” no more “being transported by big, complex novels.”

And the net result of it all is Trump.

What I want to know is how Literally Hitler came to power a century ago without the help of “the irrational, emotive Twitter revolution.” He did all his irrational emotive stuff without benefit of electronics -- except the amplification obtainable from 1920s-era microphones and loudspeakers.

I find that Sullivan’s rant is very helpful to me. Using Martin Gurri’s Five Age communications theory, we can understand that Sullivan is mourning the end of the Gutenberg age, when printed books were king, and the Mass Media age, when one-way newspapers and network radio and TV and literary and political magazines were king.

What a glorious thing it was to be a publishing king and decide what counted as “actual history.” What a glorious thing it was to be a TV king and decide what the millions of eyeballs got to watch every evening in prime time. What a glorious thing it was to be a political magazine editor king and decide what ideas deserved to have a “political effect” in a “liberal democracy.” But NO KINGS!

And now Trump. Did you know that, according to Andrew Sullivan

Trump has never actually read an entire book. He rarely even reads the daily intelligence brief.

Oh no! But here’s the thing, Andrew Sullivan. Literacy aside, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a presidency in my lifetime execute like Trump 47. Clearly, Trump or Susie Wiles or some group of Trump staffers had been planning all this for months -- or even years. And on January 20, 2025 they were ready to roll.

Here’s one teeny example, because it personally affects me and my website usgovernmentspending.com. Each year I use the budget documents at govinfo.gov to load the new budget data into my site. I use the Historical Tables, which features spreadsheets of federal spending, revenue, and debt with historical spending from 1962 and six years of budgeted spending. This year the Historical Tables only included the historical data: no budgeted data. Then there’s the Public Budget Database, with 5600 line items of historical spending from 1962 to the present, and six years of budgeted spending. This year there was no Public Budget Database.

What’s going on? Obviously, someone or some group in the Trump cabal was doing some strategic thinking about the federal budget, and part of that thinking was they didn’t want to arm their Democratic friends with pallets of budget data.

While Andrew Sullivan is worrying about deep reading and liberal democracy, I am noticing a “tell.” Democratic leaders from Sen. Schumer to Gov. Newsom to just about every statewide elected official in Oregon are not criticizing the Antifa attacks on ICE facilities. They are aligning their messaging in lock-step to suit the “far-Left” DSA types.

I’d say that elected Democrats believe that they have to go “far Left” or lose their primaries. One day, too late, moderate liberal intellectuals like Andrew Sullivan will wake up to that reality.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: AT via Magic Studio