ESPN, once the pinnacle of excellence in sports coverage and journalism, has transformed into a “negative attention” mill, sacrificing its reputation to pursue a business strategy of cheap clickbait, empty controversy, and the self-centered whining of delinquent children. For sports-lovers across America, that’s bad enough. But even worse is how ESPN’s decline presages a broader cultural collapse, one that’s dragged journalistic standards, civil discourse, and athletic culture into the national sewer.

When I was a kid in the late Nineties, watching ESPN was the sporting equivalent of religious experience. The network’s high broadcast quality of games and matches had no rival; the journalism was groundbreaking and reliable; the analysis was insightful. It should go without saying that a television station with the actual name of “Entertainment and Sports Programming Network” made athletic competition the center of its broadcasting cosmos.

ESPN was the brainchild of Bill Rasmussen, a sports journalist who aspired to create his own network after losing his media job with a Connecticut ice hockey team. After securing investors and sponsorships, his channel made its debut in 1979. Its climb to the top of sports broadcasting was slow and steady — yet, by the Nineties, it dominated America’s sports programming. There are plenty of reasons for this, from the right on-air talent to the novelty of cable television, yet perhaps most striking of all was ESPN’s innovative programming.

That began, of course, with live sports. Yet when ESPN wasn’t showing one of the “big four” — baseball, basketball, football, hockey — it showcased less popular games from tennis to billiards. There were also sporting documentaries, often involving “classic” games, like a dramatic comeback victory in the NBA finals or a no-hitter in baseball. Then there was NFL Films, a sports media company founded by a veteran of the Second World War, and which transformed old American football games into pure cinema. With aesthetic sophistication and theatrical voiceovers, its patented slow-motion spiral took on the feel of a history-altering event. NFL Films not only influenced sports coverage, but also Hollywood. Any Given Sunday and Remember the Titans are just two of the movies that made use of NFL Films’ epic style.

To celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2009, meanwhile, ESPN debuted its 30 for 30 series. Enlisting Barry Levinson, Spike Lee, and other A-list Hollywood film directors, the documentaries explored moments when sport interacted with politics or pop culture, such as the OJ Simpson murder trial or NBA legend Magic Johnson’s diagnosis with HIV. Entries in the series have won Emmys, Academy Awards, and the Peabody, arguably the most prestigious prize in broadcast journalism.

And if it might seem silly to present adult millionaires playing games as high art, ESPN also had a sense of humor. Sportscenter, its nightly news and highlight show, featured anchors as reputable for their wit and self-deprecating comic timing as their encyclopedic sports knowledge. Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick, two former Sportscenter hosts, had an effortless ability to turn out clever turns of phrase, memorable one-liners, and humorous nicknames. A good example of Olbermann’s trademark wit was his description of the infamous boxing match when Mike Tyson bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear. “Boxing is no longer a sport,” the presenter quipped. “It is a parody of the life of Vincent van Gogh.”

Taken together, anyway, it seemed as if ESPN would continue to advance the aesthetics and storytelling sport. Instead, 30 for 30 was the peak before the fall; a climber clawing at the apex moments before he loses his footing.

Network ratings and revenue peaked at the start of the 2010s. Competition from streaming services and alternative media led to the loss of younger viewers, who even among sports fans often don’t want to watch entire games, instead preferring highlight reels on social media. All this put immense pressure on Disney, ESPN’s parent company, to cut costs. The downsizing culminated in 2017, with mass layoffs of writers, on-air personalities, production crew members, and just about anyone else Disney deemed expendable. “It is really tricky in a cord-cutting environment to see a growth opportunity for ESPN,” one former ESPN executive told The New York Times.

From there, and pressured by the flatulent spread of fratboy sporting podcasts, ESPN began a frantic race to the bottom. The viewer who turns on the network today will need a strong stomach to endure hour after hour of loudmouths bloviating endlessly about any sports-adjacent subject that they believe will go “viral”. This leads to incessant repetition of tired debates, for instance whether Michael Jordan or LeBron James is the “greatest” basketball player of all time.

The hosts and commentators, sitting in studios with enough lighting to perform a root canal, also inject a bizarre amount of emotion into broadcasts. “Debates” often end in hysterics with former athletes and so-called “journalists” screaming over each other, their voices cracking, their veins bulging from their foreheads. The typical ESPN program, then, is an entry in the Real Housewives series: all millionaire talking heads peacocking as tough guys as they struggle to regulate their emotional responses, as if network executives are engaged in performance art to validate every feminist criticism of the psychologically dysfunctional man.

The master of this darkly stupid artform, and undisputed face of the network, is Stephen A. Smith, a veteran sports journalist who was previously suspended from the network for indignantly asking what a woman did to provoke the NFL star who assaulted her. He’s accumulated a record of monumental errors, sometimes questioning the performance of players who aren’t even on the field.

When Jason Whitlock, a former sports columnist, documented several contradictions and discrepancies in Smith’s memoir, meanwhile, the ESPN pundit replied by calling him a “fat piece of shit”. So he’s not exactly a candidate for a Pulitzer Prize. Yet despite his blunders, Smith is the highest paid personality at ESPN, earning $21 million per year to bug out his eyes and scream like a maniac.

Anyone looking for an indicator of the health of American culture would do well to consider how Smith has parlayed his boorish antics into dramatic acting jobs — landing roles on General Hospital and Law and Order — and, even more absurdly, political relevance. On his political podcast, he has interviewed sitting senators and governors. He has even toyed with a run for the presidency, recently telling friend and fellow egomaniacal nuisance, Bill Maher, that a campaign is “possible” because of his “disgust with the Democratic Party”. Nor is Smith alone: Pat McAfee, a former NFL punter and now lead host of ESPN’s college football programming, is similarly crass. Last year, to give one example, he shamefully repeated a false rumor that a University of Mississippi cheerleader had slept with her boyfriend’s father.

Meanwhile, ESPN still airs news shows and documentaries — but with lower budgets and less time. It’s clear, then, that the network is doubling down on its clickbait scream-fest strategy. Acting out a televisual example of the chicken and egg riddle, viewers are left to wonder if ESPN is merely following the example of a broader culture that has become increasingly crass, ill-informed, and histrionic. Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification” is too broadly applied to contemporary culture. Yet there’s much truth to his claim that when platforms abandon their consumers and move to maximize profit, they inevitably become worse.

Something similar happened at ESPN. Competition and changing viewing habits were clearly beyond the network’s control. But rather than preserving its standards, and trusting the viewer’s intelligence, it instead surrendered to a world of viral rants that confuses “negative attention” with talent.

And whatever the false allure of social media, it’s clear that ESPN’s public is disappointed. The channel’s ratings are now in freefall, while the McAfee-hosted College Gameday has lost 300,000 viewers in the past year. Overall, the network’s ratings with the much-coveted 18-34 year-old demographic have dropped by 54% in less than a decade. Reporting on ESPN’s falling fortunes in the first week of November, Sports Illustrated ran a story with the headline, “ESPN and the Horrible, Rotten, No Good, Very Bad Week.”

To put it mildly, then, things aren’t going well. The devolution toward idiocy as business strategy is failing. So, how does ESPN plan to recover its losses, while securing its economic future? By surrendering even the pretense of journalistic independence.

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Over the past year, the network has announced two corporate partnerships: one with the NFL, and the other with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). The strategic relationship will enable ESPN to stream exclusive content from both enterprises on its paid subscription network, ESPN+. It will also create “growth” and enlarge profits for Disney. If viewers are leaving, advertisement revenues decrease. A business relationship with the WWE fills the gap. Yet partnering with the WWE also takes ESPN’s status as a running joke, then injects it with steroids. Daytime hosts like Smith now interrupt daytime coverage of real sports to have shouting matches about “who is the best wrestler of all time”, debating the “athletic” achievements of men who pretend to fight while pretending to be vampires and members of the British royal family.

Beyond the unintentional hilarity, there are serious ethical questions here. The WWE is a company under consistent scrutiny for claims of sexual harassment and drug use — to say nothing of its indifference toward concussions and its now-cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia. There are problems with the network’s NFL deal too. The National Football League is the leading sports power in the US. By entering into a lucrative financial agreement with the company, ESPN has surrendered its ability to report on it with any neutrality or honesty. Fox News regularly faces rightful accusations of bias in favor of the Republican Party, but ESPN’s partnership is the equivalent of Fox signing an exclusive deal with the RNC to broadcast carefully curated content on Hannity.

Compared to war, environmental disaster, and the endangerment of democracy, the stakes of professional sports are quite low. To that extent, the word “entertainment” is in ESPN’s name with good reason. Yet the decline of journalism across all fields threatens the cultivation of an informed citizenry necessary to maintain a free society. Newspapers continue to shut down, creating news deserts throughout the US; expertise competes with opinion, while opinion itself is often little more than invective. Even worse, the tentacles of the multinational corporate octopus reach into every facet of storytelling, reportage, and analysis, shadowing journalism with a bias far darker and larger than anything that derives from party partisanship. To name one particularly brazen example, CBS News recently announced that it would broadcast a series of town hall debates on “things that matter” sponsored by Bank of America. One is tempted to assume that problems with the country’s financial system won’t matter much.

The doom of journalism, whether in athletics and politics, is far from inevitable. In the world of sport, the success of The Ringer, a sports news website and media company, demonstrates that there is still an appetite for high-quality news and analysis. Emerging platforms and alternative media companies show that, like the founding of ESPN itself, healthy innovation is always a possibility. And who knows? The decline of ESPN’s rating could yet act as an invitation to some entrepreneur hoping to give viewers what ESPN once delivered — but now neglects. But it could also act as a troubling omen. If the short-form videos of TikTok continue to influence audience expectations and journalistic output, things will only get worse.

That term “jamming” isn’t one you hear much these days, with the concept it evokes largely unfamiliar to those millions of Americans trapped by mainstream pop culture. But during a period of greater artistic freedom and exploration, it influenced and inspired the best of American music. Over 60 years ago, as young people railed against stultifying postwar convention, musicians waged their own sonic revolution — assailing the predictable, formulaic three-minute structure of the pop song. Bands that “jammed” played according to an impromptu ethos, never performing the same version of the same song twice.

Initially inspired by jazz, blues and the beat poets, jam rock defined itself in defiance of static convention, adopting an anti-corporate posture in its songwriting, live performance, and political attitude. The disappearance of the jam ethic from American music is congruent with the emergence of a pop culture that is increasingly dull, the product of sophisticated, technologically enhanced marketing techniques; social media campaigns of manufactured virality; and algorithmic approaches to everything from composition to stage costumes. It all turns music into the sound of the machine — with jam rock, what survives anyway, clinging on as the soundtrack of the human heart.

A jam, according to Haynes, is a “musical conversation”. It is the sound of music being made, composed on the spot, rather than merely played. Listen to “Whipping Post” on The Allman Brothers’ Live at Filmore East album, the Grateful Dead playing a lengthy “Scarlet Begonia” that beautifully segues into “Fire on the Mountain”, or even Led Zeppelin’s 20-minute version of “Dazed and Confused” — and you’ll enter a musical world where brilliant musicians play without a safety net, listening only to each other to learn the next cue, hook, key change, or measure, and managing, as if by magic, to create something in the moment that is unique, accomplished, but subject to change the very next night.

Disciplined freedom and composition by conversation are principles Haynes highlights throughout our discussion. “Even with the simple songs and arrangements, we take a different approach night by night,” he says. That’s true, he continues, even for songs “we’ve played many times before”.

Mule themselves showcased their exercise of the jam philosophy with their Chicago rendition of “Rocking Horse”. Originating in 1995, the mid-song instrumental jam is a chameleon, sometimes sounding like jazz funk — or, as it did in Chicago, exploding with heavy artillery that makes it easy to understand why James Hetfield, lead singer of Metallica, has named it one of his favorite songs. The jam is an aural representation of a commitment to spontaneity, with Haynes explaining that the greatest jam bands strike the balance of The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers, who could jam but also had well-structured songs. “It’s not just noodling,” he says.

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The heady blend of the genre-defying jam soon transcended Sixties icons like The Grateful Dead. By the Seventies, jamming not only created its own scene, but also became a critical part of the live performances of Santana, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Parliament-Funkadelic, and even the Rolling Stones, whose four-minute musical outro of “Can’t Your Hear Me Knocking” was improvised in the studio. By the Eighties, the Grateful Dead were selling out stadiums; through the Nineties, when Gov’t Mule made its debut, the scene continued to grow with bands like Widespread Panic, Dave Matthews Band, and Phish all building large audiences. Each developed their own identity. Panic, for instance, plays swampy southern rock, while DMB blends saxophone and violin in energetic musical interludes that complement Matthews’ emotive vocals.

Yet if the music itself is clearly part of the appeal, jamming was always about much more. As Jim Newton argues, it’s indicative of the freedom and imagination of American culture at its best. As the scholar of Sixties counterculture explains, that includes guitarists and vocalists, but also luminaries from Kurt Vonnegut to Jane Fonda. “They sensed an absence,” Newton writes of these early pioneers in his book on the subject, “that society had gone terribly wrong, and that it was time for something new — a life less rooted in reason, more accessible through vision, magic.”

That cultural context is something that the musicians themselves have often acknowledged. Explaining his band’s popularity in the Eighties, Jerry Garcia attributed the swelling crowds to people “searching for an alternative to passionless America.” When I quote that line to Haynes, he says that the jam scene still displays “opposition by example” to an America suffering from a deficit of passion. And, certainly, if it was easy to see what Garcia meant back then, amid the cheap consumerism of Reagan’s America, those flocking to see bands like Gov’t Mule today are in even more desperate need for some magic.

The fact is that modern American culture is placid, unmoving, diluted. In the contemporary commercial landscape, algorithms direct wide-eyed social media users to songs, movies, podcasts, “reels”, all frantically different, but each increasingly resembling one another. And music is, perhaps, the worst casualty of the new consumer culture. Beyond the fading fortunes of rock, after all, pop music has become narrow to the point of claustrophobia. In previous decades, pop radio made room for Prince, Elton John, and Joni Mitchell — artists who, Haynes argues, “expressed themselves on a much wider, diverse plane than anyone in pop music today.”

Now, though, pop and rock alike increasingly devolve into autotuned, machine-programmed jingles, each indistinguishable from the next. It wasn’t too long ago that a sound engineer proved that nearly every recent hit of another genre, country, used the exact same musical formula. In fact, by mixing one top of the other, the engineer demonstrated that each song was practically identical. Haynes adds that many younger musicians would balk at the jam-rock principle of performing without much rehearsal. Instead, they carefully plot and plan every note. “There is less desire to be unique,” he says, “and more of a desire to become famous.”

At the same time, Haynes argues that the dreariness of modern music has an impact on the listener. Haynes is 65 — and I’m 25 years younger — but our conversation conjured similar memories for us both: searching for bootleg live recordings at independent record stores; trading burned CDs of underground releases with friends; scavenging the internet for long-lost studio outtakes. “We both grew up at a time when we had to seek out good music,” Haynes says, “and when you found something you liked, it made a big impact.”

Yet as music has become more ephemeral and accessible, it has lost its magic. The average consumer, instead of navigating their own adventure with music, obeys the all-pervasive algorithm. It is a cliché, but one with a fair amount of justification, to argue that music is “America’s best export”. Formulaic songs, then, provide an unfortunate but accurate accompaniment to an era when most Americans believe that the country’s best days are long gone, politicians compete with various versions of nostalgia, and the larger culture, from fashion to film, reproduce money-making hits according to the same methodology, whether it is endless iterations of athleisure wear or the latest superhero blockbuster. A trend that has triumphed in American architecture, square buildings with identically gray facades, is aptly called, “blanding.” How sad for a society that once challenged the world with its inventiveness.

Cultural stagnation drains the power from music, while also generating a broader society of passivity. Woodstock, most famously, was not only a music festival, but something of a countercultural convention, where Jimi Hendrix played a distorted version of “The Star Spangled Banner” as a protest against racism and the war in Vietnam. Despite all that, and how the Grateful Dead became a roving alternative to Eighties commercialism, few bands are so ambitious these days, with the decline of jamming reflecting a culture where more and more Americans meekly accept the putrid consensus in culture and politics alike. The only song protesting the reversal of Roe v. Wade was written by Stevie Nicks: and she’s 77.

When I observe that fewer popular musicians appear willing to express genuine political thought, Haynes agrees. “It’s an internet thing,” he says, “and a cancel culture thing. People don’t want to risk what they have to voice their opinions. The environment breeds comfort with the status quo.”

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Despite the economic and political pressures to quietly conform, something of the old rebellious culture endures today. Early in their Chicago set, Gov’t Mule launch into a rollicking performance of their 2017 epic “Revolution Come, Revolution Go”. The lyrics depict a society facing vast upheaval, while casting contempt on America’s corrupt political class. “Lying to the people about some new deal,” Haynes cries, “chump change happens every day!” The music itself carries the audience along, the transitions from metal to hard bop reflecting America’s shifting fortunes.

All the while, the genre’s broad decline has arguably brought America’s surviving jammers closer together. That night in Chicago, I met obsessives who have seen their favorite band dozens of times, as they study the nightly live recordings available online, and collect the funky, artistic posters unique to each show. And if everyone is chasing an extended version of their favorite song, or hoping for the live debut of an especially obscure track, to both performers and consumers the jam music scene is a thoroughgoing community: one just as framed by freedom as its Sixties forebear.

When I ask one 20-something woman in a sky-blue sequined skirt and black combat boots why she preferred bands like Gov’t Mule to the mass marketed pop superstars of her generation, her answer is simple. “It’s just more real,” she says. “It’s just more emotional.” Her ecstatic dancing from the opening to closing notes animated her point.

While mainstream music has lost much of its vitality, authenticity and creativity seem harder to kill. Indeed, the jam music scene has recently attracted a slew of younger fans, whether they’re drawn to traditional jam outfits like Goose; Jackie Venson, who blends Prince-like guitar tones with synthesizer ambiance in free-wheeling pop-blues jams; or the bluegrass guitarist Billy Strings. Goose and Billy Strings sell out basketball arenas, playing to tens of thousands of fans, and Dave Matthews continues to play large, outdoor venues each summer to cross-generational crowds of college students and Gen-X professionals. When I caught up with Haynes, Gov’t Mule was on a co-headlining tour with The Tedeschi Trucks Band, a popular jam band formed in 2010.

Despite the vibrancy of the jam world, insiders like Haynes are concerned for the future, especially given the introduction of AI to an already-digital music world. “If people use it in a creative way,” he says, “it could be amazing, but if people use it to save themselves work and steal other people’s ideas, then it will just be creepy.” That creepiness has already permeated into pop culture with fake songs from phony bands gaining popularity on social media. Digital impostors are the logical endpoint of auto-tuned vocals, click-track drums, and computer-driven song arrangements, all of which makes it difficult to even call much of what happens on music awards shows “performance”.

If America has become too uptight and cautious, and if a jam is a loose, improvisational effort in spontaneity and artistry, one of the most salient questions of our era surely becomes: can we make America jam again? A highlight of my night in Chicago was collaboration between Mule and members of Tedeschi Trucks Band on the Grateful Dead staple “Shakedown Street”. In the middle of an ecstatic 10 minutes, Haynes played a fiery, heartfelt guitar solo. As the song moved toward its conclusion, he sang with fearless passion, offering the song’s signature lyric as a plea and a promise for a fragmented culture struggling to rediscover its own spirit of creativity: “Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart / You just gotta poke around.”

Wallace came of age in Champaign, Illinois, where his father was a professor at the state university. With its elegant restaurants and lively bar scene, the college town acts as a commercial oasis in a pastoral sea. Wallace spent much of his adult life not far from Champaign, in Bloomington, another mid-sized city. It is here that he taught literature and creative writing at Illinois State University, and where he lived when he wrote many of his most profound stories, essays, and books, including his wild and gigantic masterpiece, Infinite Jest.

Bloomington is in central Illinois. Even if it’s only 130 miles from the bright Chicago lights, it could be in another sociological universe. Farms and barns decorate the landscape, as the highway slices through fields of grass and Indian plantain, and, as Wallace puts it, “the corn is as tall as a tall man”. Much like Champaign, Illinois State University gives Bloomington a separate identity from nearby villages, as does its status as a company town: it’s home to State Farm Insurance, which employs 67,000 people and brought in $5.7 billion last year.

The mid-Midwest contains contradictions, even in its appellative cliches. The region is the “Heartland”: where everyone from culture-war reactionaries, to nostalgic Leftists dreaming of the resurrection of the manufacturing base, locate their hopes for the country. Yet these vast flatlands are also “flyover country”: not so much politically, as both parties pander for its votes, but culturally. In the Midwest, and especially its rural hinterland, it is easy to feel as if New York and Hollywood, the cultural capitals of the republic, rotate in separate solar systems.

Taken together, this contradiction creates what Wallace referred to as a “brotherhood of loneliness” — detachment from the dynamism of American society, detachment from what one imagines as the discourse that directs social progress or societal decline. Despite his eventual return to the Midwest, the author confessed to resenting his “physical place in the great schema” when leaving for New England. Those who remain can feel a wide range of emotions, from bitterness to pride, but they are either bitter or proud about, as Wallace put it in his 1993 essay, “being away from it all”.

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The vast barrenness, oceanic flatness, and dot-on-a-map desolation was overwhelming when my wife and I, on a recent road trip to Bloomington, stopped 20 miles away in Pontiac for lunch at a Burger King. Aside from a few gas stations and fast food competitors, the windows of the restaurant offered angles on nothing. A couple of steps down from the soda fountain and waste basket, there was a table fit for one with an unused chair. Adorned in a white tablecloth, and decorated with an empty plate, clean silverware, and a folded American flag, it was a tribute to the “members of our Armed Forces missing from our ranks.” “The Missing Man Table,” as it is called, “symbolizes that they are with us here in spirit.”

It was like an image out of a David Foster Wallace story — a sad expression of deep, human loneliness, but as so often, not without a counterpoint. It is inside a franchise of an industry not exactly revered for its social conscience, and smack dab in the middle of garish advertisements for sugary and high-cholesterol food products, paper Burger King crowns, and palpable boredom and dread of low-wage workers. “The Missing Man Table” is an attempt at sincere, human connection, something Wallace cared and worried about, in an environment of commercialized entertainment, something he feared would devour the decency of his country and the dignity of his countrymen.

Wallace’s prescient concerns were clear in Infinite Jest. The novel’s biggest threat is something called “The Entertainment”, a video so hypnotically entertaining that it reduces even passive spectators to a catatonic state. Social media and smartphone addiction have degraded human life and community in ways that make “The Entertainment” sound plausible. More than that, though, Wallace wrote many essays and stories, on topics ranging from pornography to John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, about how our bottomless appetite for entertainment, and technology’s ability to feed it, would transform the social compact, civic virtue — and any idea grander than momentary self-interest — into punchlines. The Pale King, his posthumously published novel about the IRS, which is mostly set in Peoria not far from Bloomington, presents public accounting as heroic: precisely because it is so boring. To overcome boredom, the novel suggests, is to open possibilities of sacrifice and service in the name of ideals that transcend momentary fixations of pleasure.

Given that everything has become entertainment, the social compact has been butchered by individualism and tribalism, and Donald Trump, a more vicious version of Infinite Jest’s ignorant lounge-singer-turned-president, is in the White House once more, the timing was perfect to visit Wallace country. After all, it is right in the middle of Trump country.

McLean County, home to Bloomington and its university, barely went for Kamala Harris, with the Democratic nominee earning 50.9% of the vote. Sections of Bloomington itself, however, supported Harris by margins ranging from 27 to 52 points.

But around the town is a sea of red. Its bucolic villages supported Trump by equally large margins as Harris’s support in the heart of the college town. The inversion of the vote captures the extremity of American division, making Barack Obama’s bromide regarding the “purple states of America” look like a bruise on the country’s fractured psyche.

As the endless bloviation about the severity of America’s political divisions imply, the ideological voter is himself creeping towards loneliness. Like no other period in recent history, political arguments sour friendships, tear apart families, and “sort communities”, in the words of Texas journalist Bill Bishop, into Left and Right. In a classic chicken-or-egg conundrum, one could ask if the loneliness that Wallace identified at the heart of the Midwest, and America more broadly, is responsible for this polarization, or is the polarization enhancing the loneliness?

Wallace’s diagnosis did not spare his own kind, the highly educated middle and upper classes of Gen X. He often wrote about the poisonous influence of the ironic detachment as a response to nearly everything. Those whose first instinct is to smirk and drop a witty one-liner in the face of tragedy or scandal will also find themselves unable to form deep social bonds, while also rendering themselves incapable of investing in a story or political project that transcends their own short-term desires.

In an essay about 9/11, written from Bloomington, Wallace describes walking over to an elderly woman’s house to watch “the Horror” on television. He feels a “sad” and “lonely” separation from “Mrs Thompson”, crying and praying in her modest ranch home. She has an innocence, Wallace writes, that he cannot himself entertain. He soon notices, for instance, some of the media’s cynical marketing ploys — every anchor has rolled up his sleeves — whereas Thompson and her prayerful friends take everything as presented. “Part of the horror of the Horror,” he explained, “was knowing deep in my heart that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America… than it was these ladies’.”

Even on 9/11, Wallace was able to intuit that national tragedy would fail to unite people whose experiences and beliefs so vastly differ. The quiet separation that Wallace depicted would eventually morph into foaming-at-the-mouth hostility during the Covid-19 pandemic.

There is no way of knowing where the falsely named Mrs Thompson lived. Wallace identified her as a woman from his church — but by “church” he was obscuring the fact that he belonged to Alcoholics Anonymous. Their meetings took place around the corner from his house, at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, a small house of worship with a fountain and flag outside. As for Wallace’s own home, it certainly doesn’t look like the place where someone would write one of the greatest American novels of the last century. It is currently occupied, but there is no acknowledgment that Wallace once lived inside. The same is true of his former office at ISU, which even now lacks a sign, photo or plaque commemorating his memory.

In a sense, that anonymity feels appropriate. “David felt safe here,” says Victoria Harris, a retired ISU English professor who was close friends with Wallace. Harris tells me that the author liked being close to his parents, and establishing good relationships with his students, but also that he enjoyed “being away from it all”. She adds that he preferred living in a quiet, “middle class” neighborhood — as opposed to more luxurious subdivisions nearer the city center. “I don’t pull an aw-shucks-regular-guy thing,” Wallace himself once told an interviewer, “[but] I treasure my regular guy-ness. I’ve started to think it’s my biggest asset as a writer.”

Wallace was in a unique position to use art and journalism to make sense of Middle America’s collapse into partisan rage and a mindless addiction to scrolling. The fact that he wrote a masterfully experimental novel from a tiny home in a normal Midwest neighborhood captures yet another duality in his work. Unlike most contemporary literary fiction, he didn’t write about the insect politics of Brooklyn, further pulling the art form out of the window of relevance of most Americans. At the same time, though, he enjoyed the reverence of the New Yorker set, giving him the potential to communicate to two different audiences.

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Yet as his absence at ISU implies, there is always the possibility that, had he not taken his own life in 2008, his country would now ignore him. America’s lack of cultural memory, and its continual erasure of history, creates a fragmented present where shared meaning is impossible to cultivate, and the dull hum of loneliness resonates from college campuses to roadside restaurants.

In recent years, journalists, scholars, and even Hillary Clinton have become worried about America’s “loneliness epidemic”, arguing that it fuels political militancy, undermines social cohesion, and contributes to violence. It feels utterly appropriate, therefore, that one of Wallace’s most popular ideas was that literature can and should make readers feel the spark of human connection. “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” he once told an interviewer, “but a piece of fiction that’s really true allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world. I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely.”

This, then, was a prophet of that deep American predicament, writing in his novels, stories, and essays about people, real and imagined, who separate from those around them and even the best parts of themselves. He linked their loneliness to misplaced priorities of attention, whether “The Entertainment” in Infinite Jest or the talk radio of the Nineties that attracted millions of listeners throughout the US, and was particularly popular in the rural Midwest — a medium of political infotainment that he ridiculed as “deeply, totally populist” but also “completely fake”.

As for Wallace himself, campus invisibility might also be explained by posthumous domestic violence allegations from his ex-girlfriend, Mary Karr, who claims that he stalked and once threw a coffee table at her. Because he is dead, of course, Wallace can’t offer his side of the story. One of his best books, a collection of short stories, mainly about misogyny, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, inevitably leads one to wonder if he battled his own demons, demons that brought pain to others, and would surely have made himself and others lonelier. Yet another irony, in a town and region full of them. In any event, now that Wallace is missing from our collective table, we’ve merely left room for more corporate chow, and fragile paper crowns.

I’m referring, of course, to three of the superstars of the so-called “intellectual dark web”: Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro. It was in a hagiographic New York Times profile by Bari Weiss in 2018 that the creaky tricycle of Rogan-Shapiro-Peterson rode into the mainstream of American life. Weiss praised them, and their inner circle of guests and fellow podcast hosts as “a collection of iconoclastic thinkers” having conversations unlike anything else in the culture.

Agree with their politics or not — “Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing America apart” is one example Weiss seizes on — there was an obvious problem even back in 2018. From the claim that free speech was under the assault from the left to the accusation that transgender women were destroying women’s sports, all the IDW’s views were orthodoxy of the Republican Party, and all had the bullhorn amplification of Donald Trump, Republican congressional leadership, and the highest-rated cable news network in America.

Since then, the iconoclasts have huddled more tightly around the MAGA consensus while exaggerating their personalities to unintentionally comedic effect. Rogan, for his part, has become a billionaire sycophant, all but crediting Elon Musk with saving the world and seeming to take Marc Andreessen at his word when he claimed that Biden staffers told him they’d “kill AI”. Another high water mark includes boasting that “bringing back” the word “retard” is one of his “greatest achievements”. His friend, Jordan Peterson, has transformed from an insightful psychotheorist, who picked up the mantle of Joseph Campbell, into someone who says, with a straight face: “Up yours, woke moralists. We’ll see who cancels who.”

And if all that’s not embarrassing enough, the trio’s political trajectory is similarly uninspiring. With the exception of Sam Harris, an IDW-adjacent figure who has now become a Left-leaning outlier, all of 2018’s “new media” superstars now mostly parrot the same lines on issues from Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to anti-Trump hysteria, transgenderism and DEI. Shapiro has broken with Trump on tariffs, and offered surprisingly strong criticism on the US president’s brazen corruption in dealing with Qatar, namely accepting the $400 million jet as a “gift”. Similarly, Joe Rogan has shown signs of humanity by expressing doubt and outrage in response to the Trump administration deporting immigrants and refugees, without due process, to an El Salvadoran gulag. Despite their occasional rebuke of Trump, they still occupy a Right-wing world with a culture that they helped to create. As a consequence, the so-called “heterodoxy” will only go so far. Don’t expect Shapiro to interview guests about climate change and universal health care. And don’t hold your breath waiting on Rogan to consider the costs of structural racism and cultural misogyny.

Suffice to say that it is a little strange that a group of “iconoclasts” and “renegades” march like wooden soldiers to the same tune on nearly every issue in modern politics. Complaining about the phantasmic threat of the all-powerful “Left” — even as Donald Trump ignores a unanimous Supreme Court ruling, and implements a Maoist defunding purge of entire sectors — is straight out of surrealist theater. Yet the absurdity is successful: so successful that other media figures have muscled in on the act too. On their respective podcasts, Bill Maher and Stephen A. Smith routinely denounce the “woke Left” while downplaying Trump’s offenses. California Governor Gavin Newsom, proving his favorite hair product is snake oil, has started a podcast too, sitting down with Right-wing activists such as Charlie Kirk to, you guessed it, ridicule progressives.

Nor can you really blame them: beyond the continued popularity of the original IDW trinity — Rogan reached 20 million listeners a week in 2024 — they’ve also turned politics into a remarkable moneymaker. To emphasize they’re in business, Peterson, Shapiro and the rest will take occasional pauses from their identical rants to pitch nutrition supplements, sleeping pills, and life insurance. It leads to awkward moments. Shapiro’s robotic, mile-a-minute delivery of his latest take on the widespread slaughter in the Middle East, suddenly transitions into shilling for a phone company. This stuff is easy to mock, but then again Shapiro himself can chortle all the way to the bank. Estimates of his yearly earning range from $10 to $20 million.

And with an audience comes influence — not just of the straightforward political variety either. Thanks to Jordan Peterson, the IDW podcast world has suddenly found Jesus. For example, Rogan, who once famously identified as an atheist, now declares that it would be a good time for “Jesus to come back”. One is tempted to quote the late George Carlin — “Jesus is coming. Look busy” — but several of Rogan’s fellow podcast bros have adopted a similar line. In a new media chicken-and-egg paradox, it difficult to determine if the podcast world is influencing clerical authority or vice versa, but the Catholic Church has created, in the words of one report, a “Catholic right celebrity conversion complex”, relying on figures like Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and other hosts to “make faith-appeals” and fight the supposedly “feminized church”.

It isn’t enough to speak with uniformity about politics and culture; the new media rebels must also express agreement that atheism is destructive, and religion gives society purpose and meaning. New friend of the IDW, Russell Brand, currently facing sexual assault charges in the UK, now baptizes people in tighty-whities, even as he recites scripture and leads his audience in prayer. While praying at a rally over the summer, he caused Jordan Peterson to break the third wall and laugh at a plea for God to rescue the West from “Kafkaesque, Huxleyan, Orwellian” forces. Peterson himself provoked laughter during his recent appearance on the “Jubilee Debate” in which he squared off against 20 college atheists. He sputtered, refused to answer if he is an actual Christian rather than some kind of vague theist who finds inspiration in the Bible, and even played the part of the hall monitor when he abruptly ended an exchange with one young man over his sarcastic and contemptuous tone. The decline of Peterson is unfortunate, because he can produce genuine insight in his field of psychology, and he could have positioned himself as a Joseph Campbell-style psychotheorist for the new media age. Instead, he’s become yet another casualty of the increasingly imbecilic culture war. On the right side of the battlefield, his audience shows all the signs of loyalty, and his popularity will likely endure for many years.

Taken together, then, the brave, exciting new world of uncensored, authentic media — where “dangerous” ideas thrive — has collapsed into Fox News with infomercials. And for all of the familiar complaints about “liberal media bias,” the mainstream press continues to salivate over reactionary, manosphere “new media” stars, both oldies like Rogan and newcomers like Theo Von. A comedian turned political provocateur, Von peddles updated variations of antisemitic conspiracy theories. According to him, you apparently “have to be afraid to even say ‘Jew’” in Hollywood. Von has admitted to not knowing that Judaism precedes Christianity, and that there are practicing Jews of all races. Despite his ignorance, the New York Times profiled him as a “proxy for the average American citizen” having “vibey conversations” that “dismantle the interview show”.

In other words, then, the IDW continues to go from strength to strength. But that still leaves the question of why. As those bursting accounts imply, I think one answer is money, not just made but spent. As Eoin Higgins details in his new book, tech billionaires have coalesced with “anti-woke” activists in the podcast world to shift “alternative” media away from heterodoxy — and towards the kind of conservative conformity that dominated talk radio in the Nineties and 2000s.

There’s plenty of practical evidence here too. Marc Andreessen, a billionaire and Trump enthusiast, is a leading investor in Substack. For his part, Peter Thiel owns Rumble, the Right-wing version of YouTube, while David Sacks has a large share of Facebook. Speaking of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg recently joined the digital MAGA commune, largely because Trump falsely promised the end of an antitrust case against Meta over its purchase of Instagram. The allegation that the Kremlin, through a false front company, paid podcast hosts hundreds of thousands of dollars to unknowingly sow discord among the American electorate, has also done nothing to soften the Right-wing cacophony that advertises itself as revelatory commentary.

There are other cases where the influence is more subtle: the result of networking, shared interests, and overlapping incentives. In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky details how one of the most powerful filters of media influence is the “ownership filter”. When tech-billionaires own the most powerful platforms, and they all have the same low tax, monopolistic agenda, it is hardly surprising that those platforms most heavily promote (and compensate) hosts who excoriate progressives: who also just happen to back antitrust actions against Silicon Valley.   

Not that demolition of heterodoxy and variety is just about funding. There are cultural factors at play too. In 2005, the late David Foster Wallace shadowed Jon Ziegler, a Right-wing talk radio host in California. Ziegler has since become a “Never Trump” Republican. But when Wallace met him, he attracted attention by making racist jokes, objectifying women, and pushing the boundaries of conservative opinion on issues ranging from welfare to profiling of Muslims in airports.

 Though Wallace acknowledged the importance of financial interests — explaining that “my radio company has zero incentive to promote the public good” — he also argued that “anger” and “clarity” sell better than emotions like joy and satisfaction, and certainly better than things like nuance and complexity. It is easier to structure a worldview, and therefore an entertainment product, around a simple, enraged perspective. Wallace observed that the motive for simplicity creates a dangerous game for Right-wing hosts who pride themselves on violating standards of political correctness. To appear more authentic and daring, the talk radio (or podcast) host has to venture further and further beyond the limits of polite society.

Joe Rogan recently displayed this dynamic at work by hosting, in separate episodes, Ian Carroll and Darryl Cooper, antisemitic conspiracy theorists who have made sympathetic remarks about Hitler while claiming that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the Second World War. He’s also hosted Suzanne Humphries, a street corner crank who believes that tuberculosis is a side effect of the smallpox vaccine, and that the Covid vaccine contains snake poison. 

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The political consequences are not minor. As recently as 2012, it was common knowledge that Republican officials lived in fear of Rush Limbaugh’s denunciation. Now, second only to Donald Trump, they move like lemmings according to the orders of Right-wing talk show hosts and podcasters. Historian Nicole Hemmer has described how “conservative media became the institutional and organizational nexus of the conservative movement” — helping to solve the political mystery of why one of America’s two major political parties demonstrates more interest in mocking and irritating “the woke” than addressing the dysfunction of American health care, public education, and social services. 

Of course, the dumbing down of American life did not happen overnight. Richard Hofstadter wrote his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life back in 1966, and despite the mainstream nostalgia for so-called better days, Right-wing media doesn’t have a friendly history. As an example, William F. Buckley opposed the civil rights movement and suggested, in print, that the government force gay men with AIDS to get tattoos indicating their positive status above their buttocks.

In other words, then, the “new” media is merely the same old wine in a fresh bottle. What has changed, though, is that the attention span of the American public is increasingly fractured and shortened, and that legacy institutions from newspapers to political parties can no longer exercise any restraints over discourse. It is likely that the problem will get worse, and eventually, poison the Left too. Certainly, the New York Times and Slate offering glowing profiles of Hasan Piker is ominous. Piker is a podcast host who claims to hate capitalism while selling clothing apparel with his face on it, laughs at people who show sympathy for Israeli hostages, and declares that “America deserved 9/11”.

David Foster Wallace concluded his profile of Ziegler with what he called an “editorial note”. As he put it: “One can almost feel it: what a bleak and merciless world this host lives in — believes, nay, knows for an absolute fact he lives in. I’ll take doubt.” Wallace might not have predicted the medium, but he certainly understood the message. The psychological algorithm has met the technological algorithm, leaving us in a bleak world indeed.

Taken together, in fact, I think that the ideas animating Magaworld, though contradicting each other on the surface, represent a distinct societal force — one that divorces the republic from reality, and though years in the making represents a bewildering new retreat from empirical truth. A few years back, Kurt Anderson wrote a book exploring how America has become, to use his eponymous term, a “fantasyland.” I’d go further: it’s clear that the Trump presidency is a fantasyland administration for a fantasyland people, and one with depressing implications for the future of American democracy.

Perhaps the clearest example of Trump’s loony politics is Pete Hegseth. The Secretary of Defense, as the latest case study for America’s obsession with boring redemption-conversion stories, has morphed from a binge-drinking lothario into a fire and brimstone Christian fundamentalist. Forget his toe-curling leaks to journalists: in a series of podcast interviews last year, Hegseth spoke warmly of “sphere sovereignty” — which posits that civil law should defer to the Old Testament, even on matters of women’s rights and homosexuality.

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Such theocratic ambitions are central to the dogma of “Christian Reconstructionism” — the same theology that guides Hegseth’s church in Tennessee. Part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, its founder Douglas Wilson has argued that, in the war for Christian supremacy, women, children, and other civilians are legitimate targets, stating that “the word of God tells Christian soldiers what to do.” Wilson’s rabid form of faith prompts questions as to whether or not Hegseth, a member of his flock, believes that the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution should dictate military policy — or the ravings of an Idaho preacher.

Certainly, Hegseth extends his apocalyptic worldview to domestic affairs, writing that the Christian Right is in a “holy war” against the “Leftist spectre”. Nor is that the only spot where the far-Right fringe is now at the very heart of government. That’s clear enough around the so-called “unitary executive” theory. Developed by Russell Vought, Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, it posits that, contrary to centuries of Supreme Court rulings and scholarly interpretation, the US Constitution gives the president complete and exclusive control over anything that falls within the purview of the executive branch of government.

The “unitary executive theory” resides in the same cul-de-sac as the dreams of techno-monarchy that Curtis Yarvin promotes in books and interviews. His belief that democracy is bloated and ineffective, and therefore, in need of replacement from a governing elite, has inspired Peter Thiel — mentor to none other than JD Vance.

Yet amid this unsurprising fear of far-Right influence, the far Left, too, has made its mark. To understand what I mean, look no further RFK Jr. He may have a name and history that many Americans associate with liberalism, but the Secretary of Health and Human Services’s lineage is deceiving. Unlike his father and uncles, he’s a promoter of deranged conspiracy theories, including that HIV does not cause AIDS; that the Covid-19 vaccine was a medical experiment on blacks and Latinos; that Covid itself was engineered to spare Jews and Chinese; and that African Americans have different immune systems than whites, resulting in reduced need for vaccination.

Commentators of the Left typically wonder “what happened” to Kennedy — once a respected environmental lawyer — while those on the Right parade him as a prop for the power of MAGA ideology. The reality is that Kennedy simply represents a faction of the Left that looks at the “medical-industrial complex” with contempt.

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Tulsi Gabbard, for her part, has followed a similar trajectory. Once the co-chairperson of the Bernie Sanders campaign, the former Democratic member of Congress and presidential candidate advocates for Trump policies with a convert’s zeal. Yet if she’s dumped her support for universal health care, and abandoned the eradication of fossil fuels in the Honolulu surf, her foreign policy positions have remained consistent. In 2017, Gabbard introduced legislation in Congress to “end our country’s illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government” — and shortly after the bill failed to reach a floor vote flew to Damascus to meet President Assad.

These sympathies extend to the leader who helped Assad drop bombs on the people of Aleppo: Vladimir Putin. In this, Gabbard retains support among the so-called “anti-imperialist” Left, people like Max Blumenthal and Matt Taibbi who blame every geopolitical problem on the United States.

I could go on here — but beyond these varied examples, what does this frantic blend of Left and Right actually signify? I think that vivid phrase “fantasyland” can start to offer an answer. As America’s democracy weakens, it becomes aggressive and epistemologically reckless. There’s no longer any belief that the leading institutions of American society — from major political parties to the mainstream media — refuse to accommodate. Accusations of “elitism,” “snobbery,” or “disrespect” of religious faith await anyone who utters a complaint about hallucinatory fantasies that now pollute every conversation of political importance.

The bipartisan phantasm of the Trump administration signifies the completion of a national transformation, one resulting from this misguided accommodation. And it isn’t as if the former gatekeepers of discourse, especially in the legacy media, didn’t, at least in part, invite their own destruction. The leading newspapers, journals, and television networks, with few exceptions, were wrong about the disastrous war on Iraq. They ignored the warning signs of the 2008 financial crash — even as, long before that, they offered shortsighted reporting on the Vietnam War and the AIDS crisis.

Noam Chomsky famously lambasted the mainstream media for “manufacturing consent”. Yet if it’s clear that elite opinion-making is in desperate need of an overhaul, the anything goes, anything is possible blend of cynicism and gullibility that’s replaced it is even worse.

Consider, if nothing else, how quick mad-as-a-hatter conspiracy theories now spread online. There was the “plandemic” documentary asserting that a cabal of international elites planned the Covid-19 pandemic, even as millions of Republicans believed that Joe Biden “rigged” the election in his favor. All the while, large numbers of Leftists reflexively assumed that the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life was fake. The mentality that propelled Trump to power is, in other words, bipartisan and deeply cultural — rather than merely political. Nearly half of Americans believe in demonic possession, while almost a third believe in astrology, and 57% think that ancient advanced civilizations like Atlantis actually existed.

None of this is totally new. Religious fundamentalism, con artistry, and hateful manias have always troubled the American psyche. The Know-Nothing nativists of the 19th century; McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare of the 20th; and the evergreen quality of End Times preachers all show that there is a bottomless appetite for American absurdity. But what made the inauguration of Donald Trump different was that it marked the first time that the forces of absurdity became the country’s governing force. Discontent with the decadent status quo led not to thoughtful reforms — but a rejection of reality itself.

To be fair, not everyone is happy at Trump’s carnival mix of extremism. Many of his policies, especially his assault of vital social services, have already provoked outrage. Opposition will only grow if the Republicans proceed with their plans to make massive cuts to Medicaid. Yet even if his policies ruin Trump’s presidency, the mindset they represent is here to stay, not least given the poisonous effects of social media. Expect America’s fantasyland to remain open for many years to come.

The tense conversation begins with Edwards asking both guests if they’d shake hands. After both answering — with a terse “sure” — Jackson elaborates. “I, over the years, developed the capacity to accept and respect all human beings for their worth.” Yet Jackson’s assertion of the foundational dignity inherent in all people, even those as vomitous as Duke, did not prevent him from summoning his formidable intellectual powers to steadily dismantle the historical fabrications, philosophical failures, and simple hatreds of his opponent. Quite the contrary: it made him more effective as an advocate.

The hour that Jackson spent ripping the cover off Duke’s childish delusions of white supremacy sprang to mind when I read about vice president Kamala Harris’s rejection of an invitation to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast. According to Jennifer Palmieri, a former Clinton aide who worked on the Harris campaign, Harris was prepared to accept, acknowledging the importance of an opportunity to speak to Rogan’s millions of listeners.

But then, the doomed presidential candidate rowed back. As Palmieri puts it: “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it.” The same apoplectic staffers predicted that, by meeting with Rogan, Harris would incite widespread anger among young progressives, threatening the campaign’s hope of high turnout among college-aged liberals.

It’s easy to imagine the conversation revolving around sickly terms in contemporary vogue, like “platforming” and “legitimising”. But strip back away the vocabulary, and the juvenile implication becomes clear: Joe Rogan has cooties, and if Kamala Harris sits next to him, she’ll get them too. But if her Democratic successors want to enjoy even the whiff of power over the years ahead, they’ll need to channel Jesse Jackson and engage with their opponents — and have the courage to explain why they’re wrong.

It is unlikely that Harris would have won the election even if she’d spent three hours on The Joe Rogan Experience. And, to be fair, there are reasons to object to the format. The stereotypical shock jock, he has aired conspiracy theories about vaccines and the moon landing, among many other topics, even as he features comedians who make jokes about rape.

In the end, though, candidates for political office must confront the world as it is: and the fact is that Rogan is a colossus, hosting a show boasting over 14 million listeners on Spotify and 17 million subscribers on YouTube. Increasingly, though, talking to people one finds disagreeable, or even objectionable, feels tantamount to heresy across much of the Left. When Bernie Sanders appeared on Rogan’s show, many progressives chastised him. It is common for university students to boycott, reject, or heckle Right-wing speakers. A political scientist at UC Berkeley has even argued that, if liberals hope to succeed, they must embrace a more forthright form of politics.

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Clearly, no one would claim Rogan is anything like David Duke, a man who proudly led a domestic terrorist organisation that lynched black men, raped black women, firebombed black churches, and planted burning crosses on the yards of civil rights workers. And yet, faced with an opponent far more daunting than Harris’s Rogan, Jackson never blinked. Throughout his lively, but surprisingly civil, debate with Duke, he demonstrated not merely his brilliance, but also his confidence: the exact quality so lacking among young progressives who spend their time braying on social media.

Jackson, a civil rights leader who marched on Selma and served as a close aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, certainly had familiarity with conversation among a wide range of people. When he ran for president, in 1984 and 1988, he was the first candidate to make gay rights part of his campaign, conduct bilingual events with Latinos, and regularly appear on Native American reservations. In short, he helped create the “rainbow coalition” of the Democratic Party, while also speaking directly to constituencies that might otherwise oppose his message, such as white family farmers in Iowa, and coal miners in Kentucky. “We can leave the racial battleground,” Jackson would tell audiences, “to find economic common ground, and reach for moral higher ground.”

The same principles were clearly on display in 1977, with Jackson forcefully articulating belief in America as a multiracial democracy of expansive opportunity. That stood in stark opposition to Duke’s conception of the country as a white nationalist homeland, built by white people for white people. “The idea that America belongs only to white people has no theological base,” Jackson explained, “because white people did not make America, God did.”

Jackson added that the white nationalist fallacy also lacks a “historical base” — because, he said, even white academics accept Native Americans arrived first. The genius of the American experiment, Jackson argued, is that it brings people from “many nations” together to live in relative closeness and harmony. “America,” he emphasised, “is neither African nor European nor Asian.” To explain what he meant, the civil rights leader drew examples from America’s industrial base (Chinese building the railroads), and education (Jewish contributions to academia), and the military (the black soldiers during the Civil War). All these people, in their way, were Americans, even as they heralded from different racial groups.

How did Duke respond to this eloquent display of American unity? In the first place, he tried to disguise his hatred, but even then his racist mask slipped. He asserted, for instance, that black people were “culturally inferior” to whites, imagined Thomas Jefferson “throwing up” when walking through the south side of Chicago, and referred to American cities as “jungles.” He also enunciated the white whine that remains popular in 2024, rebuking the media for “denigrating” white Americans and conjuring a conspiracy to crush their political and economic rights. Duke even made the fatuous complaint that it’s unfair that black civil rights groups are socially acceptable — but the KKK isn’t.

Faced with such nonsense, Jackson never wavered. One of the most powerful aspects of the debate, in fact, is his laconic strength. He never lambasts Duke as “offensive” and never ridicules Edwards for “platforming” the KKK. Instead, he offered logic, historical knowledge, and rhetorical agility to show Duke as a fool. During one of the many interviews I conducted for my book on Jackson, he used the word “expose” to explain his willingness to debate Duke, linking the decision to his belief in performing “moral jiu-jitsu” on evil. “You use their own weight and force against them.”

Humour was another weapon in Jackson’s arsenal. There’s an exchange in the middle of the debate that captures Jackson’s success, provoking laughter from the audience, the host, and even Duke himself.

The KKK leader asserted that horses contributed more to the US economy than slaves. Then, he asked if horses deserve equal status as white citizens. Rather than merely voicing outrage over Duke’s comparison of black human beings to animals, Jackson responded with a joke: “If we are going to use hard physical work as the basis,” he quipped, “then, the horse will be in control, blacks will be second, and whites will be third. We’ll be run by horse power, and they will be rode by black power, and white people will be trying to fight for the rights of the horse.”

Repartee was a standard move in Jackson’s moral jiu-jitsu, and his riposte to Duke’s racism demonstrates that one can exploit entertainment tactics without succumbing to mindless populism in the Trumpist vein. At any rate, it’s another example for liberals: humour is more appealing than opprobrium.

In contrast with the contemporary era of endless moral panic, Jackson embarrassed Duke through reason, persuasion and wit. No less important, he deployed the same arguments to the political fights of tomorrow, stressing that intellectual excellence was critical to the progress of black Americans. “The Constitution of the United States, which has as its philosophical base theories of natural rights, represents the evolution of the highest logical thought in government,” Jackson told his audience, before explaining that black success depended upon the willingness to debate convincingly. African Americans, the preacher reminded viewers, were always destined to be a small minority. They therefore had to convince the white majority of the efficacy and morality of civil rights.

No less important, Jackson used his platform to speak beyond his black base. Like in his later political career, he evoked a prosperous future for all Americans, regardless of their colour. “I chose to participate on this programme,” he explained toward the end of the debate, “because as more white people develop economic anxieties and insecurities, they become more vulnerable to spurious logic, because their fears can be played upon by demagogues.” From there, Jackson outlined an agenda of shared prosperity, encompassing full employment through a robust infrastructure programme, alongside easier access to community banking and health care.

Given Trump has often wrapped his hatred of immigrants in vague terms — he talks of economic populism even as he’s accused foreigners of “poisoning the blood of the country” — Jackson’s proposals could have fit right into 2024. Certainly, his performance back in the Seventies elegantly shows why Democrats of tomorrow should worry less about “legitimising” their foes and more about demonstrating strong leadership on social and economic problems.

Speechcraft and policies should cleave closely together. And just as Jackson obviously had a robust grasp of the practicalities of politics back in 1977, so too did he wheel back and deliver a rhetorical knockout to his KKK opponent, along the way exposing his fundamental weakness in all its absurdity. “What is significant to me about Mr Duke’s argument,” Jackson explained, “is that he is not consistent with the highest, the best, and the most logical of white thought. He is representing a distinctly small minority whose logic is spurious and untenable.”

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By the end of the debate, you almost get the sense that Duke agrees. Nervous and frustrated, he conceded that Jackson’s clear intelligence is not “representative” of the black race. Assuredness, then, is a crucial quality of leadership. Its absence invariably leads observers to question the strength of a candidate. Considering that Kamala Harris’s best campaign moment involved her destruction of Trump during their only presidential debate, it is all the more vexing that, because young progressives cannot comprehend the importance of argument and persuasion, she finally refused to go on Rogan’s podcast. Harris herself was a proud supporter of Jackson’s campaigns for the presidency in the Eighties. She had no excuse, then, to forget his example. By giving Rogan’s audience a case for liberalism and feminism, they might have been persuaded. At the very least, they’d have learned that Harris, and other feminists, are not as easy to caricature as some might imagine.

Nor, again, is this merely a lesson for history. Rather, in all those political battles that remain unfought, those on the Left should recognise, like Jackson before them, that confrontation and engagement are far more valuable than simply shunning the enemy. It is impossible, in the end, to perform moral jujitsu from outside the ring.

By the turn of the century, the New Jersey native had already established himself as a rock and roll legend. But his artistic reaction to 9/11 enhanced his importance. Less than a year after the attack, he recorded The Rising, his first album with the E Street Band since the Eighties. Despite the centrality of politics to those frantic days, the collection was strikingly unideological. Instead of protest, Springsteen opted to explore grief and mourning, and how to find hope in the immediate aftermath of a devastating loss.

Among its most effective and moving moments is “Into the Fire”, an overt tribute to the first responders who ascended the stairs of a burning, crumbling building in the desperate hope to save the lives of strangers. “Love and duty called you someplace higher,” Springsteen sings in a tender voice. “Somewhere up the stairs / Into the fire…” The chorus functions as a prayer to the heroic firefighters, police officers, and paramedics: “May your strength give us strength… May your love bring us love…”

In other words, then, Springsteen understood that the rescue workers represented and exercised the best of humanity. They were, and are, worthy of praise and remembrance that transcends narrow political strife. It’s a pride, a heartfelt patriotism, you can still spot today. At a recent rally in Georgia, in support of Kamala Harris, Springsteen emphasised the need for presidential candidates to understand the US, its history, and “what it means to be deeply American”.

Such gentle flag-waving is rare on the progressive Left, placing it at odds with the heavyweights of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the Republican Party adores a presidential nominee who recently referred to the United States as a “garbage can”.

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This angry new world was arguably forged as far back as 2015. That year, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a memoir, Between the World and Me. Framed as a letter to his teenage son, Coates examined racism in the United States, focusing mainly on police brutality.

Like Springsteen, Coates offered a reaction to 9/11. But this time, the writer is shorn of all sympathy, all grace. “Looking out upon the ruins of America, my heart was cold,” he confesses. Referring to the firefighters and cops, he writes, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

It is difficult to find a more contemptible passage in the past two decades of American letters. Yet despite such a chilling lack of empathy, Coates has won nearly every literary prize imaginable, including a National Book Award for Between the World and Me. From the American press, he receives the pious reverence typically reserved for the Pope at Sunday mass.

A rare heretic, Tony Dokoupil of CBS News, recently asked Coates a series of challenging questions about his indifference to Israeli history or suffering. In his latest book, The Message, which has a large section on the Israel-Palestine conflict and attacks Israel as an “apartheid” state, Coates never once mentions October 7. Two intifadas, or indeed any loss of Israeli life, are notable by their absence too. For exercising the mundane obligation of his profession, Dokoupil was reprimanded by the network. Many influential pundits on the progressive Left, notably Mehdi Hasan, screamed about the interview for days on social media. The digital herd stampeded toward Dokoupil’s characterisation of The Message as not out of place in the “backpack of an extremist”. The language is strong, but hardly unfair.

One wonders if to Coates, Israelis, like the firefighters rushing up the stairs of the World Trade Center, aren’t really human. Is that why they are unworthy of inclusion in his one-sided book? Certainly, the contrast with Bruce Springsteen is only heightened when you recall that, on 13 October, he performed a benefit concert for the USC Shoah Foundation, an organisation that preserves the testimony of Holocaust survivors, and raises awareness to the ongoing threat of antisemitism.

As unlikely as it might seem, then, Springsteen and Coates personify a crossroads for the American Left. Liberals and “progressives” can choose a humanistic, big-hearted liberalism, one that seeks common ground in the pursuit of personal freedom and social progress for minority groups. Or they can crawl into a sewer of a narrow delusion, one that pits “oppressors” versus “victims” and “colonisers” against “the colonised” — and where some people, no matter how much they’ve suffered or the grace that they’ve shown despite their suffering, are hardly human at all.

The deification of Coates, and the contempt for the lone journalist who challenged him, is an ill omen. And it’s far from alone.

While the American Right has morphed into an autocratic personality cult, assembled around an increasingly deranged Donald Trump, the Left is fighting its own internal battle. So far, the Democratic Party has managed to contain the Leftist revolt against reason to a small number of congressional representatives and city officials. Recently, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman lost their seats in Missouri and New York, during Democratic primaries, after mouthing antisemitic bromides against Israel, and articulating extreme positions against law enforcement and the free market.

One still must wonder how long sanity will prevail. To put it differently, it’s possible that American culture no longer has the infrastructure necessary to maintain political movements of humanistic liberalism. Algorithmic social media is an easy scapegoat here, but it is undoubtedly true that fewer Americans obtain their news and commentary from reading, instead opting for TikTok videos and Twitter soundbites that reduce complicated issues to slogans, and simultaneously squash complicated people into cartoonish enemies. To that point, Ta-Nehisi Coates has declared that the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most intractable problems of modern times — a collision of politics, religion, and territorial claims — is “simple”.

Likewise, criminal justice is “simple” if you believe that diverse police forces in modern cities, like New York and Chicago, are nothing more than heirs to slavery patrols. During the 2020 primary, meanwhile, Joe Biden displayed bold honesty when he told a voter demanding a prohibition of fossil fuels in the first term of a Biden presidency to “vote for someone else”. Then again, climate change and environmental science are simple if it’s feasible to “ban” oil and gas over just four years, or anyway to do without causing immeasurable human suffering along the way. Springsteen himself seems to understand the need for pragmatism. When he took the stage in Atlanta, after all, he didn’t talk about those things that divided Americans. Rather, he underscored the importance of civil rights, and looked forward to a middle-class economy that served “all our citizens” equally.

I think it’s clear, then, that there’s a linear relationship between rejection of nuance and negation of human beings. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack, anti-Israel protestors ripped posters and flyers showing the faces of Jewish hostages off walls and telephone poles in London, New York, and other cities. Students and faculty at prestigious universities in the United States, including Columbia and Georgetown, praised the Hamas “resistance” and defaced campus property with red triangles, the Nazi symbol for political enemies. In May, a spreadsheet went viral identifying popular authors, some of whose work is apolitical, as “Zionists”. The point, anyway, was to encourage the blackballing of authors from book festivals and other events.

Literary agents, many speaking anonymously, have claimed that it has become difficult to earn publishing contracts for authors who support Israel or write about overtly Jewish topics. Matisyahu, a Jewish American singer/songwriter who favours Israel and addresses antisemitism in song, had three performances cancelled after several venues were spooked by the risk of protest.

At the American university where I teach, the only acknowledgement of the first anniversary of the October 7 massacre came from a student group denouncing Israel’s “genocide” against Gaza. There was not a single reference to Jews murdered, raped or abducted by Hamas. That’s unsurprising. Israel, according to prevailing wisdom on the far-Left, is something of a headquarters of evil — a colonialist project and an apartheid state. Its citizens, in turn, alongside anyone who expresses solidarity with them, are readymade villains. “Zionist” now functions as little more than an antisemitic slur.

A popular theory of psychology posits that the way a person reacts to one thing is the way that they’ll react to everything. The ignorant and antisemitic reaction to October 7 portends that American Leftists may well react with similar revulsion toward knowledge, nuance, and compassion to future crises, both foreign and domestic. With the Republican Party already tolerant of death threats against everyone from librarians to hurricane relief workers, American politics could yet transform into a high volume, kinetic duel in which conversation is impossible, and the threat of violence always poisons the air.

Recent philosophers of liberalism now read like letters from an ancient age. In his 1998 book Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty argued that the Left should return to “piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy” as opposed to obsessing over “systems” and “power”. The measured use of government to improve people’s lives — echoing the great liberal achievements of the 20th century, from the Civil Rights Act to Medicare — would not only create a fairer and freer society. It would also allow liberals to tie their aspirations to hope, rather than the bitterness of the perpetually morose cultural Left.

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During Covid, for instance, extending the child tax credit succeeded in reducing child poverty, even as its expiry provoked little protest. In the same vein, Leftist activists on social media love to demand “Medicare for All” — yet never seize the opportunity to advocate for a public option as part of the Affordable Care Act, or push to lower the entry age to Medicare, as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden suggested during their respective presidential campaigns. They may not offer the same online thrill, in short, but aiming for realistic achievements could significantly improve the welfare of millions.

Robert Putnam, author of the sociological classic Bowling Alone, believed that the practical method to achieve Rorty’s ambition was to reverse the decline of community, and cultivate a nation of joiners. As Putnam argued, the more people associate, in civic clubs, religious institutions, and indeed bowling clubs, the likelier they are to build empathy and solidarity, engineering healthy democratic politics in the process.

With both Left and Right so embittered and self-righteous, it’s difficult to imagine anyone replicating the legislative successes of previous decades. Civic virtues themselves — from civility and humility to logic and empathy — now feel like the relics of a bygone era.

The image of smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center, and Bruce Springsteen’s soulful artistic response, also feel like long lost history. The singer/songwriter connected the liberal values of pluralism, individual rights, and communal improvement to the heroism of the first responders. Coates, conversely, wrote that the first responders were not human. In political culture, the latter view is winning.

Given that the principles of liberalism were essential to the construction of a free and prosperous society, one with the capacity to correct injustice, an increasingly cynical and angry America may want to borrow Springsteen’s optimism. “Blow away the dreams that tear you apart / Blow away the dreams that break your heart,” he belted out in Atlanta over the weekend. “And I believe in a promised land.”