or a half-century, the trend in political culture has been inexorably in one direction: toward the steady loosening and eventually the near-obliteration of media filters.
If someone has a voice that other people want to hear, that voice is going to be heard. No smug editor at the New York Times or damn anchorman at CBS News is going to get in the way. Who the hell elected them, after all, to decide what points of view were worthy of dissemination, what facts or rumors or even flat falsehoods should reach average citizens, who could decide for themselves what to make of it?
The erosion of traditional establishment filters — first by such mediums as direct mail, talk radio and cable, later and most powerfully by social media — has been a primary factor in the rise of potent ideological movements on right and left alike.
It is why the election and bizarre presidency of an insurgent disruptor like Donald J. Trump — inconceivable in the 20th century era of establishment media—was eminently conceivable in this era.
And it is why the decision Friday night by Twitter to permanently ban Trump from its platform is a signal moment — a historic move, even before we know the consequences that will flow from it.
It represents an effort to reassert the notion that filters have a place in political communication and that some voices have lost their claim on public legitimacy — even when that voice has 89 million followers and is just two months past receiving the second-highest number of votes in U.S. election history.
Twitter’s announcement was made with a righteous air, as the company said it was acting “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” after Trump’s raucous lies about a stolen election inspired backers to take over the Capitol on Wednesday. Across a wide spectrum of politicians and commentators, there were exultations of relief, many mingled with it’s-about-time exasperation.
Twitter’s move is plainly an effort to act responsibly in the face of Trump’s irresponsible words and actions.
Even so, the question seems unavoidable: Are you sure about this?
In strictly political terms, it could well give buoyancy to Trump and his supporters — a new cause for the grievance that fuels them. The moves comes at precisely the moment that his movement looked like it had been fatally punctured, due to the cumulative effects of Trump losing the 2020 presidential election, Democrats winning the Senate in Georgia special elections and even once-loyal Trump Republicans expressing disgust with his culpability in Wednesday’s insurrection.
In a way, Twitter’s move highlights the essential conundrum of the Age of Trump. His pathetic braying about a “stolen election” shows contempt for democracy. But he is a force to be reckoned with — the only reason it is worth banning his account in the first place — because he has scores of millions of people who believe deeply in him. His attack on democracy is also a perverse expression of democracy.
In historical terms, Twitter is swimming — possibly with limp strokes — against currents that have come to define not only contemporary politics but the broader culture as well. Perhaps Twitter feels its gesture is sufficiently resonant, and its influence in public discourse so central, that it can change those currents. Quite the feat, if so.
One way to understand those currents is to go back to November 13, 1969 — seven years before Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was born. Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s vice president, traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, to speak to a meeting of Midwestern Republicans and deliver a scathing denunciation of television network news.
