LONG ENDURE: Rosen discerns the shape of the threat!

FRIDAY, JULY 10, 2026

Refuses to say their names: Can our form of government, can our nation, "long endure?"   

President Lincoln floated the question at Gettysburg. Today, we're involved in a great societal war which raises the question again.  

Will we be able to find our way "back out of all this now too much for us?" We've been asking that question for years at this site. 

As he starts this essay for The Atlantic, Professor Rosen joins us in not being real sure.  Just to refresh you, we'll show you his headlines again:  

IDEAS
American Democracy Wasn’t Designed for This
Can our 18th-century institutions survive 21st-century technology?

In his essay, Rosen suggests the possibility that our democracy won't survive the influence of a set of new technologies. We've been telling you that for years. We think his aim is true.

What's the nature of this existential crisis? As he starts, Rosen takes us back to the questions the founders asked when they decided to form a new nation. For starters, he quotes Hamilton saying this:

"The important question: whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice."  

Are we humans really capable of engaging in cool, clear reason? Rosen describes "a central premise of the Enlightenment," a premise he says the founders shared:

"Ordinary human beings are capable of recognizing truth on their own." 

According to Rosen, the founders generally believed that. We humans have the capacity to sit down and reason together.

Today, though, we're mired in a tribal propaganda war which has largely given the lie to that cheerful notion. We humans believe the darndest things:

Remarkably large percentages of the population have been persuaded, over the years, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya; that "death panels" were part of the Affordable Care Act; and that Hillary Clinton was involved in a pedophile ring which may have operated out of a Washington pizza shop.   

Before that, one of our nation's most famous Christian preachers had peddled a film which suggested that Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in a long string of murders. In 1994, the nation's leading talk radio host had advanced the notion that Hillary Clinton was somehow involved in the death of Clinton aide Vince Foster. 

(On the Fox News Channel, the multimillionaire monster Greg Gutfeld continues to pimp that general framework today. He pimps it night after night.)  

How many of us "ordinary human beings" may come to believe such notions and claims? Below, you see the numbers from a recent survey concerning the most significant misapprehension of the past six years:

Half of Republicans say the 2020 election was rigged   

This week's Economist/YouGov Poll finds sharp divides in public confidence in U.S. elections, with Democrats and Republicans holding vastly different views on the legitimacy of the 2020 election, the credibility of Donald Trump's recent election-rigging claims, and expectations for the fairness of future elections.

28% of Americans—including half (50%) of Republicans and only 9% of Democrats—believe that the 2020 presidential election was "rigged." Republicans who identify as MAGA supporters are about twice as likely as non-MAGA Republicans to think the election was rigged (66% vs. 32%).  

As a result of persistent claims by President Trump, 50% of Republican respondents said they believe that the 2020 election was rigged.

The sitting president has had six years to produce evidence in support of this poisonous claim. Many Americans have failed to notice the fact that he has neglected to do so. And not only that—also this! 

[continuing directly from above]  
Trump recently claimed that this year's primary elections in California were rigged. One-third (33%) of Americans believe he has concrete evidence to support this claim; 67% think he is just trying to sow doubt in the legitimacy of the elections. Most Republicans (72%) think Trump has [concrete] evidence to support his claims of rigging in California. MAGA Republicans are far more likely than non-MAGA Republicans to believe Trump has evidence of rigging (84% vs. 51%). Only 3% of Democrats think Trump has concrete evidence of the elections being rigged.  

How about it? Did the president really produce "concrete evidence" in support of that additional claim? In this survey, 72% of Republicans said they believe that he did. 

In many cases, it's hard to prove that a given claim is false. (Old bromide: You can't prove a negative.)  Under current arrangements, it may not matter if you do manage to prove, or if you do manage to seem to prove, that a given claim is false.

Quite routinely, it won't matter if you show that some claim is bogus—and Rosen understands why that is. 

The founders were fearful of "factions," Rosen writes. (Today, such entities sometimes go by the name of "political parties.") 

In Professor Rosen's telling, "Madison believed that the tendency to form factions is 'sown in the nature of man.' " Rosen explains why Madison was optimistic in spite of that belief.

That said, it's plainly true! We humans seem to be wired to split off into rival tribes. And some modern technologies have created a world in which the tendency to split into tribes badly undermines our ability to reason together as an intelligent nation. 

He mentions the Internet, and he mentions social media. Such technologies have created an obvious problem, he says. He says the problem is this:

Democracy has been resilient for a long time, but that doesn’t mean it can’t reach a breaking point. Social media is an unprecedented challenge: In every way, it represents the Founders’ nightmare. ...More than any previous communications technology, social media has the effect of herding users into likeminded communities where they never have to hear an opposing point of view. In a 2020 article in Science, 15 psychologists and political scientists wrote that America’s political divisions were being amplified by “popularity-based algorithms that tailor content to maximize user engagement.” If the Founders had been able to spend an hour on X, they would have been a lot less optimistic about human beings’ capacity to govern themselves by reason rather than passion.   

According to Professor Rosen, "social media has the effect of herding users into likeminded communities where they never have to hear an opposing point of view." In other words, it has the effect of creating like-minded "factions"—including political parties in which 72% of members believe poisonous claims which almost surely aren't true.

According to Professor Rosen, social media has this effect more than any other new technology. We can't necessarily say that's true.

Unfortunately, and rather strangely, Rosen never mentions talk radio. Also, more tellingly, he never mentions "cable news." And he certainly never says the names of the players who, at present, are undermining the very chance of continuing with a successful version of government "by the people."

Rosen doesn't say their names! As you may have noticed by now, people of his professional class never do. 

Tomorrow, we'll explain what we mean by that unflattering comment. Also, we'll visit a world where the corporate messenger Charlie Hurt is eating away at the possibility that government of the people will survive—will long endure, won't "perish from the earth."

Tomorrow: They never say their names