I think people underestimate just how extreme this sort of assertion is. To quote Cadwalladr: "I didn’t think it was possible to have free and fair elections ev

I think people underestimate just how extreme this sort of assertion is. To quote Cadwalladr: "I didn’t think it was possible to have free and fair elections ever again. That liberal democracy was broken." Apparently, decentralized media and the threat of foreign meddling are reason enough to believe that liberal democracy is not just working poorly, not just compromised at present, but permanently impossible. Without getting into specific charges, I think the claim is completely ahistorical. Compared to the media of the 1990s, it's relatively easy to frame wild misinformation as a newly-released genie that's going to change everything forever. But the early history of US democracy, until perhaps 1850 or 1900, was overwhelmingly one of limited and misleading information. US history classes celebrate as breakthroughs in democracy a great many things that fall far short of Cadwalladr's measure for a doomed republic. Mass media connected politicians directly to their public - but FDR used the threat of antitrust suits to have radio stations spike any stories critical of him. Cheap printing and mass literacy opened access to printed news, which lied the country into the Spanish-American war. Thomas Nast helped inform the masses and break the boss system - by bringing their knowledge of politics to the now-decried level of "regurgitating political cartoons". Early presidential campaigns were overwhelmingly conducted by spreading lies about the opposing candidate to voters who could not possibly fact-check them, so blatantly that much of modern negative campaigning looks wholesome. I don't particularly want to go back to the information levels of 1800, but I also don't think we're particularly at risk of that. The suggestion that people telling lies to voters is a novel and catastrophic threat is one that's almost never put in decent historical context, and it seems misleading to lament a narrow and recent set of changes as though they have no counterparts in the past of democracy.