The Washington Post, under billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, has just laid off 300 journalists, shuttering entire sections including its acclaimed sports section and getting rid of all its Middle East reporters. Particularly horrifying to me is the shuttering of the book review. This is part of a trend. The Associated Press ended book reviews last year and the (awful) New York Times Book Review is now just about the only game in town, at least for newspapers. I believe that most of the knowledge worth having is found in books, and book critics have a vital function in introducing the public to important books, criticizing bad books, and helping literary culture thrive. I would never claim the Washington Post Book World section was singlehandedly sustaining the country’s intellectual lifeblood (although I will deeply miss the often-devastating writing of Becca Rothfeld, one of the few book critics in the country who actually criticizes books). But some part of me feels this country is doomed unless it has book reviews.

I realize I’m going to sound like a bit of a snooty liberal—when are you going to quit Current Affairs and join the Atlantic?, the letters will read—but I’m romantic about the World of Ideas and the importance of debate to a healthy society. I realize that winning the battle of ideas does not win the class struggle, and the pen is no match for the sword in face-to-face combat, but I am scared to live in a society whose members are incapable of having deep discussions and arguments.

There has been a change, at least online, over the last 10 or 15 years. I remember a time, back when I was a baby blogger (a blogger in his infancy, that is, not a blogger on matters pertaining to babies), when the internet seemed full of heady intellectual argument. On Facebook, we had arguments back and forth for days over foreign policy, healthcare, religion, nationalism, gender, environmentalism. In its early days, Current Affairs itself had a Facebook forum that was filled with lively debate, and I used to get long letters-to-the-editor disputing points made in our articles. There were particularly acrimonious discussions of religion—Scott Alexander has traced the collapse of New Atheism, which populated endless discussion forum threads with arguments about the existence of God, the validity of evolution, and the truth (or otherwise) of the Bible. I distinctly remember political bloggers going back and forth “fisking” each other’s posts, dissecting their arguments line by line.

Much of this was pointless, and I have no nostalgia for New Atheism, which was often tinged with Islamophobia and neoconservative foreign policy views. (The old atheism still suits me just fine, thanks very much.) There’s a cartoon from this time depicting the classic online-debate enthusiast who cannot go to bed because “Someone is wrong on the internet.” At the time, it seemed ridiculous that people spent so much time writing long arguments explaining why strangers were in error. And even today, I am not pining for some Golden Age of Internet Argument.

But I’ve come to wonder whether the only thing worse than arguing on the internet is not arguing on the internet. Something happened over time, and I think it coincided with the rise of Donald Trump and the emergence of Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok as the social media platforms of choice. A lot of people just stopped bothering to defend their ideas against people who disagree with them. The arguments dried up.

Big Tech bears its share of the blame here. Facebook intentionally reduced the prominence of political content on its platform in 2021, ostensibly to combat misinformation, but the change had the effect of disincentivizing popular participation in dialogue on issues of major importance. Twitter and Instagram both discourage linking to outside websites, meaning that people are more likely to keep consuming the bite-sized thoughts on these platforms than to check out an extended essay that might get them thinking more sophisticated thoughts. Some of the killing is more direct, like Jeff Bezos simply firing book reviewers, but I think that if our Tech Overlords wanted to construct algorithms that encouraged critical thought and in-depth reading, they could certainly do so. Facebook or Twitter could encourage its users to join a reading group, suggest books they might like, prioritize book reviews and essays in their feed. Instead, in part because the manchild Elon Musk is incapable of having a thought deeper than a single tweet, the rest of us have been sucked into the same world. The transition from forums and blogs to “social media” and video has disfavored longform writing, and it is a transition that has been engineered by massive companies. With the rise of AI, which allows people to avoid formulating thoughts altogether and let the machines do it for them, it seems to only be getting worse.

This is a difficult phenomenon to write about, because I’m not quite sure how to prove it or quantify it (suggestions welcome), but I know there has been a shift here, because I’ve experienced it firsthand over my 18 years as an online writer. I became so used to defending my ideas against critics, and then gradually the critics stopped writing criticism. When my book Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments came out in 2023, I expected a barrage of furious negative reviews from conservatives. Instead there was… silence. I spent two years meticulously compiling my objections to right-wing positions, expecting annoyed rebuttals exposing my supposed fallacious reasoning and poor sourcing, and instead the book just disappeared.

This may also be related to what Jason Myles describes in a recent Current Affairs piece as the pro-wrestling-ification of American politics. It is not that the Obama era was truly a time of cerebral and sober-minded discourse in which every American enacted the Lincoln-Douglas debates in their dealings with their fellow members of the electorate. Obama himself was a politician who ascended to power based on image, rather than substantive policy commitments. But in part thanks to Trump—who is himself a creature of Twitter, always expressing himself in short blurts of outrage or braggadocio—we seem to be drifting ever more into a world where ideas simply do not matter.

I’ll give you an example: Back in the Occupy Wall Street era, people were not only pissed off about the bailouts of the big banks. They were also having important philosophical discussions about fairness. David Graeber’s book Debt posed the question of whether and when debts are moral obligations, and there was voluminous discussion about it. Some said he was excavating important insights, some said he was full of shit. Thomas Piketty’s ponderous Capital in the Twenty-First Century got a similar reaction. But I can’t remember the last time a book of ideas made a splash. (Although Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto was huge in Japan.)

Again, I need to avoid being too romantic. But I grew up on big public debates (Galloway v. Hitchens, Chomsky v. Dershowitz), and what they taught me is that if you believe something, you need to be prepared to defend it. You need to have evidence for it. You need to know the other side’s position, and be able to refute that. But now, it seems we are not just in a post-truth era, we are in a post-argument era, where everyone realizes that the thing that matters is not whether you make sense but whether you have power. We are in a time, for example, when RFK Jr. is the head of Health and Human Services even though he is demonstrably ignorant about statistics and therefore pushes falsehoods that endanger public health. When he was campaigning, Current Affairs published an article exposing some of his errors. Others did the same. Did he refute or rebut any of it? No. Did it matter? No, now he’s in power and working tirelessly to bring measles back to America.

But this is not just a right-wing phenomenon. It’s true that fascists believe you don’t need an argument when a bullet will do, but I think many on the left have also given up on making arguments. I’ve been trying to do research for an article on antivax talking points, and one thing that has struck me is that while there are many (often self-published) books laying out the case against vaccines, there are almost no blogs or articles reviewing (or “fisking”) these books and explaining where they go wrong. When I wrote about Thomas Sowell, I noted the failure of leftists to engage with his arguments, which furthers his ability to claim that he’s not responded to because progressives fear the devastating power of his logic.

I have had to resist the urge to give up on arguments myself. I used to write 10,000-word deconstructions of right-wing pseudointellectuals like Charles Murray and Jordan Peterson. Now the right doesn’t even bother to supply pseudointellectuals. I used to write articles on philosophical questions like: is it immoral to possess wealth and why? People read those articles. Now, I feel like it’s not worth discussing.

It’s funny: I’m actually turning away from a position I used to hold, because the facts have changed around me. A few years ago, I used to discuss the question of whether philosophy could be justified in a time of crisis. That is to say: when authoritarianism is on the rise, shouldn’t we be out in the streets resisting, not sitting around in Capital reading groups or debating questions like what is justice or what is the optimal rate of taxation? And I still believe that politically urgent times call for engaged activism and that it’s not morally acceptable to withdraw from politics. But I also find myself craving debate again. I find myself dusting off my old books of political philosophy, watching G.A. Cohen discussing whether socialism is an ethical imperative, mentally wrestling with Ayn Rand’s defense of the heroic capitalist creator. I want to think again, and in the second Trump term I feel the pressures toward brain rot growing stronger and stronger. I never thought the right’s intellectuals (like Rand) were particularly intelligent, but at least they put forth claims and defended them. They didn’t just punch you in the face. I do not share Ezra Klein’s view that the late Charlie Kirk was “practicing politics the right way” (he was an ignorant bigot who ran a dark money network) but he was willing to have drawn-out public arguments with socialists like Ben Burgis and Briahna Joy Gray. And I do fear a world in which someone like Kirk is “refuted” with a bullet to the neck rather than through persuasion.

The closest thing we have to public debate right now is the maddening spectacle of Jubilee’s “Surrounded” videos, which turn debate into a kind of game show where you have to argue against the clock. But where does someone go now for sustained engagement with ideas? I never thought I’d miss the world where people were writing ten-paragraph political posts back and forth until three in the morning. But when I think about a healthy democracy, well, it involves argument and debate. And I didn’t miss arguments until I saw them start to disappear.