First Amendment Fatigue

Perhaps you’ve seen the bumper stickers that became popular during the covid lockdowns and mask mandates, pulling a famous line from the preamble to the Constitution, the sticker read:

“We the people...are pissed off.” That turn of phrase pulls on some very American threads—the consent of the governed—government by the people, for the people—ideas that are core to the American identity and to our conception of our system of governance. Our recent brush with government overreach during the Covid era roused the American spirit and reignited a passion for the voices of the people to be heard, not as subjects, but as citizens.

And the multiplication of voices has indeed occurred as X, Instagram, and YouTube have become our new public square, debate forum, and news source. Gatekeepers defunct—fact checkers dismissed—institutions sidelined. The voice of the everyday American is what matters. You are your own publisher, you are your own gatekeeper, you are your own institution. This ethos is perhaps best expressed in the viral social media phrase “do your research,” a phrase that means, in essence, don’t believe what ‘they’ tell you—find the guy who has been silenced and marginalized. The one whose funding was cut and whose books are difficult to find. In the new world it is the disreputable source who has become reputable. But here’s the irony: the more every voice can be heard, the less we can hear anything at all.

The multiplication of perspectives doesn’t lead to clarity, but to confusion. And nowhere has that been more vivid to me than in watching my mom navigate cancer treatment. The glut of

perspectives and alternatives is unmanageable. Initially she did all of the conventional things ‘following the Science’ where her oncologist told her it pointed. As the orthodox approach proved ineffective, my mom became open to alternatives and there was no shortage of people who had ‘done their research’ and were eager to tell her what she needed to do, who she needed to contact, and what protocols she needed to follow. What we discovered is that the world of alternative medicine isn’t a world, but a galaxy containing many worlds. And the rulers of each world do not agree with one another about how the galaxy ought to be governed. I remember my mom’s distress when—while on one doctor’s alternative treatment protocol—she read a book by another fellow in this galaxy who said that the things she was doing were actually going to feed her cancer. This experience could be multiplied many times over across any number of experiential domains.

My point here is simple: the multiplication of voices—the revenge of the ‘we the people’

ethos—isn’t a strategy for a free republic, it’s a set up for its downfall as it produces a kind of intellectual fatigue that reminds us why we had things like tight institutional controls and top down leadership in the first place. My mom’s experience is a microcosm of our political life: the swarm of voices doesn’t give us clarity, it gives us exhaustion. And amidst that exhaustion, people long for someone—anyone—who can cut through the noise and tell them which way to go.

In her dense but insightful essay The King and the Swarm, Mary Harrington makes exactly this point. Our system of governance is in crisis, and what will emerge remains to be seen. But in her mind, given the dynamics described above, some form of monarchy—even if only in a functional sense—could be on the horizon. I think she’s right for a number of reasons that I’ll explore in future essays.

This essay, then, opens a larger project: to trace America’s political trajectory through the lens of our moral and technological trajectory. It is an attempt to read the moment we’re in—because if we can read the storyline rightly, the lessons to learn and the applications to make become far clearer.