Last night, a panel of distinguished journalists convened for a special edition of Washington Week With The Atlantic to assess the state of American democracy 250 years after the Declaration of Independence. The verdict? The grand experiment is currently experiencing what Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic, described as an “epistemological crisis.”
“You have people who no longer share a lived reality, or no longer operate from a common baseline of fact and information,” Alberta argued. What's particularly striking, he added, is how many citizens have “reached the conclusion that no one is looking out for them, that no one has their best interest in mind, that no one can be trusted.” So, basically, the founding fathers' dream of a well-informed electorate has been replaced by a nation that can't agree on what day it is, much less what's true.
Joining The Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, for this sobering 250th-anniversary discussion were Alberta; Stephen Hayes of The Dispatch; Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Idrees Kahloon and Ashley Parker, both staff writers at The Atlantic; and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker. The full episode, titled “America: The Next 250,” is available for viewing - presumably while you still have a shared reality in which to watch it.