Matt Bai

If you were going to single out the most dangerous functionary in President Trump’s little circle of Hell, you’d have plenty of candidates from which to choose. But don’t sleep on Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. His legacy of awfulness may prove more durable. His rhetoric is all about ensuring a “diversity of viewpoints.” He holds himself out as an honest broker in search of a more balanced media.

In trying to make sense of the current political moment, I like to imagine what historians might say a century from now, with the distance and dispassion that today’s historians may bring to the First World War or the Great Depression. It’s guesswork, of course, but lately I’ve been coming around to one conclusion that may seem obvious decades from now: that America can have social media, or we can have a healthy democracy, but it might have been foolish to think we could have both for long. Rarely has the corrosion of social media been so plainly exposed as it has been since the horrific <