Opinion | Social media has changed our politics for the worse

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 killing of Charlie Kirk. First came the prurient images of a man’s dying moment, a kind of Zapruder GIF spreading at the speed of sound. Then the usual performative posts, issued as if we were all awaiting the poster’s personal statement on the tragedy, devoid of substance and intended mainly to convey moral superiority. These were followed by President Donald Trump himself (on his very own social media platform) vowing to take vengeance on his political opponents. And finally, the self-righteous stomping of contrarian views, resulting in damaged careers, because there’s no point having an online mob if you can’t give it someone to trample.

[Matt Bai is a journalist, author, and screenwriter.]