The Case For Kids
The most significant thing happening in the world may very well be a thing that is not happening: Men and women are not having children. The biblical logic has been reversed, and the barren womb has said “Enough!” (Prov. 30:16). The paradigmatic affliction of the Old Testament is now the great desire of nations. If Rachel wanted children more than life itself (Gen. 30:1), our generation seems to have concluded that nothing gets in the way of life more than children.
True, human beings are reproducing—but in most countries, not fast enough to replace themselves. Measuring total fertility rate (TFR) is not an exact science, so the numbers vary from source to source, but the trends are undeniable. Outside of Africa, which is home to forty-one of the fifty most fertile nations, the planet faces a bleak demographic future. Many major European nations—such as Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, and Spain—have a TFR of 1.50 births per woman or lower, disastrously below the replacement rate of 2.1. Italy’s future is especially grim, as that country has one of the lowest TFRs in the world, just 1.22. Virtually every country in Europe—including the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Finland, and Denmark—has a TFR below 1.8. Only France, with a TFR of 2.03, comes close to the replacement rate. Decline is on its way. The Russian population is already contracting. Germany’s population is on pace to shrink from 83 million to around 70 million over the next thirty years. If trends do not reverse, Europe’s population will plummet from 750 million today to less than 500 million by the end of the century.
The numbers for East Asia are even worse. Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan each have a TFR around 1.0; South Korea’s is 0.81. These countries make aging and shrinking Japan, with its TFR of 1.37, look almost vibrant. And whatever military and economic power resides in China, increasingly children do not. Despite the replacement of the notorious one-child policy by a two-child policy in 2016 and then a three-child policy in 2021, China’s birthrate has continued to tumble. As recently as 2019, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicted that China’s population would peak in 2029. But the decline has already started. This year, for the first time since the Great Famine (1959–61), China’s population has shrunk, by just over 1 percent since 2021, according to the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
For many years, the United States appeared to be an exception to the rule of declining birthrates in the industrialized world. In 2007 the United States had a TFR of 2.1, whereas the figure for the European Union was below 1.6. But since then, the U.S. birthrate has fallen by 20 percent, to as low as 1.73 according to some estimates. What looked like American exceptionalism less than a generation ago now looks like mere delay.
At no time in history have people been having fewer children. In most countries the number of births per woman is well below the replacement rate, and even in countries with a high TFR, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa, the rate is dropping. The human race seems to have grown tired of itself.
The reasons for declining fertility are no doubt many and varied. Surely, some couples want to have more children but are unable to do so. Others struggle with economic pressures or health limitations. But fertility does not plummet worldwide without deeper issues at play, especially when people around the world are objectively richer, healthier, and afforded more conveniences than at any time in human history. Though individuals make their choices for many reasons, as a species we are suffering from a profound spiritual sickness—a metaphysical malaise in which children seem a burden on our time and a drag on our pursuit of happiness. Our malady is a lack of faith, and nowhere is the disbelief more startling than in the countries that once made up Christendom. “I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven,” God promised a delighted Abraham (Gen. 26:4). Today, in the lands of Abraham’s offspring, that blessing strikes most as a curse.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich predicted worldwide famine and a “race to oblivion” in his book The Population Bomb. Fifty years later, the bomb has not detonated. Today, we must fear population bust rather than boom. The list of Very Bad Things—as Jonathan Last calls the consequences of declining fertility in his 2013 book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting —is long and depressing: an aging population, a shrinking workforce, a declining tax base, a decrease in technological and industrial dynamism, difficulty in finding a spouse, empty buildings and crumbling infrastructure, unfunded entitlements, and a general disquiet as more and more people get older and sicker with fewer people to care for them. Some future president might be forced to coin the campaign slogan, “It’s midnight in America.”
Last emphasizes economic and national concerns, the sort of developments that get the attention of presidents and parliaments. But the problems with declining fertility, and the accompanying collapse of the family, go much deeper. Whittaker Chambers was led to reject atheism by studying the miracle of his infant daughter’s ear. As he watched his daughter eat in her high chair, an “involuntary and unwanted” thought entered his mind: “Those intricate perfect ears” could have been “created only by immense design.” Faith can give us a heart for children, but children can also give us the eyes of faith.
When family formation fails, so does the inculcation of faith. This is Mary Eberstadt’s argument in How the West Really Lost God: Family decline is not merely a consequence of religious decline; it is also a cause of it. Religious people are more inclined toward family life, but it is also the case that something about family life inclines people toward religion. There is no need to prioritize chicken or egg. It is the indissoluble connection that matters: The fortunes of faith and family rise and fall together.
There are many plausible reasons for this connection. The Christian story is set within the matrix of family—from the expectation of Eve’s Snake-Crusher, to the Promised Seed of the patriarchs, to great David’s Greater Son, to the birth of the Christ Child to Mary with Joseph at her side. The presence of children often drives parents to church, whether for help in raising them or because the experience of creating children helps us apprehend our Creator. The sacrifices required in parenting are the same kinds of sacrifices required in a life of Christian discipleship.
The connection between faith and family cuts in the opposite direction as well. As Eberstadt observes: “In an age when many people live lives that contradict the traditional Christian moral code, the mere existence of that code becomes a lightning rod for criticism and vituperation—which further drives some people away from church ” (emphasis original). In other words, if your parents were divorced, or you grew up with two mommies, or you are currently sleeping with your girlfriend, or you are not particularly enamored of the thought of monogamy and raising children, the Christian faith—which has always been a scandal to sinners—carries an additional offense, which previous generations did not have to overcome. “People do not like to be told they are wrong,” Eberstadt notes, “or that those whom they love have done wrong. But Christianity cannot help sending that message.” No doubt, secularization has undermined family formation. Just as surely, though, the collapse of the married, intact, childrearing family has made the Christian faith harder to swallow. The biggest plausibility structure for faith is not intellectual but familial.
Carle C. Zimmerman’s Family and Civilization (1947) is remembered as a book about family types, but it is fundamentally a book about fertility. Borrowing from Augustine and Aquinas, Zimmerman argues that marriage has historically had three functions: proles, fides, and sacramentum. That is to say, the good of marriage (and of family life more broadly) depends on childbearing, sexual fidelity, and the permanence of the marriage bond (whether one holds to a Catholic view of the sacraments or not). Peter Lombard ordered the marital goods somewhat differently, placing fidelity before childbearing. But Zimmerman observes that the ordering of Augustine and Aquinas emphasizes childbearing—or prior to marriage, the intention of it—as the first and determinative step in the development of marital fidelity and permanence. Without children (or an openness to children), the other two commitments lose their moral and logical coherence.
Already in 1947, Zimmerman saw that the atomistic family—the family based on individualistic assumptions about happiness and the role of marriage—would lead to rapid and groundless divorce; that looser family structures would be proffered as solutions to family problems, only to make those problems worse; that the stigmas inhibiting adultery would deteriorate; that fertility would decrease; and that sexual perversion would be normalized. He also predicted that the decline of fertility among intellectuals would embolden them to challenge the validity of marriage itself; that it would take two generations (slowed by immigration) for family decay to become evident; and that the Christian Church would be the only cultural institution capable of encouraging a view of family grounded in something more than personal fulfillment.
One popular view holds that the birth-control pill led inexorably to declines in fertility. In his 2018 book Birth Control and American Modernity, Trent MacNamara examines newspaper accounts and the rhetoric of popular moralists in the first half of the twentieth century to show that natalism declined in accordance with changing norms, more than on account of new technologies. Americans did not decide to have fewer children because they had run out of land or because industrialization had made children less valuable as farmhands. Those common accounts make little sense (as if children came out of the womb ready to milk cows, and did not need to be fed and clothed and looked after). Americans started having fewer children for reasons at once simpler and more comprehensive. A combination of moral pragmatism and liberal social optimism did the trick for most. Twentieth-century Americans became convinced that the new technologies would give their (fewer) children better lives than they themselves enjoyed. They saw birth control as prudent economic altruism. They prioritized observable results over first principles. Above all, MacNamara insists, they believed that fewer children meant more security and more happiness. Almost a century later, that moral calculus has probably changed very little.
The new wrinkle in our day is the perceived threat of climate catastrophe. I recently read remarks from an elite liberal journalist, to the effect that the number one question people ask him after speeches and at dinners is whether they should have kids at all, knowing that kids will contribute to the “climate crisis.” Quite apart from debates we might have about the science of or solution to climate change, the intellectual assumptions behind the question are profoundly anti-human. The Bible encourages us to see the beauty of God’s creation, and the Bible is not indifferent to the frogs and dogs and fireflies. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord (Ps. 150:6). But the Bible’s narrative arc is not geocentric (as if the redemptive story were mainly about earth) or biocentric (as if it were mainly about plants and animals). The Bible’s story is anthropocentric. God sent his Son to save those made in his image. What’s more, as those made in his image, we are not an alien species on the planet, malignant tumors that only devour and destroy. We are sub-creators. We are meant to tend the garden. We can solve problems and make the world more inhabitable. If the climate crisis is as dire as we are told, lasting solutions will come from the efforts of our children, not their elimination.
It is striking to note how different our version of the good life is from Isaiah’s eschatological vision. In Isaiah 65, the prophet unveils the coming of the new heavens and new earth. The vision includes elements all people would cherish: peace, prosperity, protection. But the vision is also surprisingly domestic. We hear of children no longer dying in infancy and children born for blessing instead of calamity. We read of building houses and inhabiting them, of planting vineyards and eating their fruit. The picture is familial and generational, with an old man, a young man, an infant, and descendants together with their parents. Today’s version of the good life is more individualistic and more consumeristic. The good life has migrated from the home to the marketplace, to places of entertainment, and to the inner recesses of the self. Blessing is found in escaping the home—in travel, in consumption, in freedom from the bonds of domesticity.
My aim is not to make a theological case for or against birth control. The predicament we are in as a nation does not require Christians to eschew every form of family planning. Even with nine children, I am not a fertility maximalist. My wife has been blessed with relatively easy pregnancies (easy for me to say!), and we have more household space and household income than many other families. Our sacrifices are not what a couple with a gaggle of children living in a squalid apartment in New York City in 1930 would have made. I do not urge Christian couples to have as many children as possible.
But I do urge them to have more children. How many more I cannot say. Many couples must weigh risks pertaining to age, illness, miscarriage, or difficult pregnancies. But “more than two kids,” and “more kids than you think you can handle,” might be a good place to start. The fertility gap between religious and nonreligious Americans has been growing for two decades and now is wider than ever. This gap is not enough to offset the defections of “nones” from the ranks of the church—but it could, if religious Americans increased from barely hitting the replacement rate to about 2.4 children each. In other words, the difference between three kids and two kids—provided the culture of faith is thick enough in the home and in the church to keep those kids among the faithful—could be the difference between an America in which religion is declining and an America in which it is on the rise.
Unfortunately, contemporary American life does not make raising lots of children easy. I am reminded of the line from the comedian Jim Gaffigan (a Catholic and father of five): “Big families are like waterbed stores. They used to be everywhere; now they’re just weird.” Parking lots and parking garages are not made for fifteen-passenger vans. My family almost never eats out (for which many restaurant-goers are thankful). Flying all of us anywhere, without a lot of planning and saving, is crazy expensive and just plain crazy. Though the vast majority of people in our church-dominated lives have been extremely supportive of our big family, occasionally we get a vibe from strangers that communicates: “Are you foolish or just ignorant?” When our kids attended public school, we constantly heard that stories and examples in the classroom needed to “represent the diversity of our community,” which always meant more stories about LGBTQ families, never about big families going to church.
A culture with declining fertility will become accustomed to smaller and smaller families. The feedback loop is hard to interrupt. With fewer children, parents become more child-centric. And as parents become more child-centric, they do not see how they could possibly have more than one or two children. Even good parents—perhaps especially good parents—are susceptible to the assumptions of kindergarchy, where children rule the roost and moms and dads are expected to be all things to their children. How can parents have more than a couple kids if each child needs from the parent a constant companion, a camp director, a gourmet chef, a vacation planner, a coach, and an omnipresent safety net? To say nothing of the gargantuan car seats that must be installed and uninstalled, the slew of forms that must be filled out at every stage of life, and the cost of raising a child in an age when young people are expected to consume much and contribute little. It takes a stubborn otherworldliness for parents to dare to give their children more by giving them less.
Important as fertility is for the health (and existence) of a nation, pro-natalist governments have had little to show for their interventions. When Japan sounded the demographic alarm in 1990 and established an inter-ministry committee on “creating a sound environment for bearing and raising children,” its TFR was 1.54. After thirty years of Angel Plans, Childcare Leave Acts, a “Plus One Plan,” and a “Next Generation” law, Japan’s TFR stands at 1.36. This is not to say that governments should not enact pro-family tax policies and legislative priorities. I am all for making it easier and less expensive to raise children. Governments can help people to have the children they want. But they have not proven capable of convincing people to have children they do not want.
Part of being a conservative is being realistic about what we can achieve on earth. The disintegration of the family will not be undone in five years—maybe fifty, if the Lord allows. Still, we can do our part to promote social health in the here and now and to sow seeds for a later harvest. To that end, I offer two modest proposals.
First, we must put the institution and well-being of the family at the center of a renewed conservatism. One need not agree with all of Yoram Hazony’s critique of classical liberalism to recognize that his proposed “rediscovery” of the family in conservative thought is long overdue. Many of the philosophical fathers of liberalism were not fathers at all: Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Mill, and Bentham were all childless, and Rousseau abandoned his five children to orphanages. Conservatives must find a way to defend the God-given rights of the individual while affirming that the exercise of those rights takes place chiefly within the gift of the family. Such a conservatism will not just insist on vaguely defined “family values.” It will stand resolute in the conviction that all efforts to redefine the family as something other than a pre-political institution rooted in sex differentiation and procreation will not lead to civilizational health.
Second, if we must place the family at the center of our conservatism, it is even more critical that we place it at the center of our lives—not a god, of course, but one of the very best things God wants us to pursue. Christian schools should reassess whether they are preparing students just for college and career, or whether they are preparing them also for the family. Pastors and priests should make sure their people know that the most direct path to changing the world starts with changing a diaper. Too often Christian leaders lay impossible burdens on their people, insisting that they solve a host of social ills and become experts in a thousand different areas, forgetting to assure them that to get married, raise children in the church, and stay married is a life well lived. Women in particular need to know that motherhood is not a lesser calling, an interruption in the real business of life or an impediment to their being truly purposeful (which usually means being more like men). Just once I’d like to see a Christian college spotlight a stay-at-home mom in its alumni magazine. From the way Christian schools market themselves, you would never imagine that most of their women graduates become mothers or that normal family life is an honorable calling.
Moreover, we must understand marriage as the exchange of duties and obligations, not merely of emotions and experiences. And we must admit—scary as this sounds to me as a parent of four teenagers—that many young men and women should be getting married earlier. The postwar baby boom was actually a marriage boom. The average size of families did not increase as much as the number of people forming families did. Since 1950, the average age of first marriage for women has increased from just over twenty years old to almost twenty-eight. Women are having fewer children in part because they are having fewer married years in which to have children. And surely, for both sexes, resisting the allure of pornography and fornication is not made easier when sexual desires burn hot for ten or fifteen years before marriage is ever considered. The Bible never says “Thou must finish thine education before marriage,” or “backpack through Europe before marriage,” or “make time to binge-watch Netflix before marriage.” The Bible does say that it is better to marry than to burn (1 Cor. 7:9).
Above all, we must believe what the Scriptures tell us, that children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward (Ps. 127:3). Having children is not for the faint of heart. Kids are expensive. They are messy and exhausting. They take your time and can break your heart. They probably will never love you as much as you love them. Let’s not be romantic about it: Children are a burden. But they are also one of the greatest earthly blessings. Have we turned Rachel’s cry of desperation on its head, asking God to keep children from us lest we die to ourselves? The promise to Abraham of progeny was not his curse, and neither is it ours. A man like a warrior with arrows in his hand, a wife like a fruitful vine, and children like olive shoots around the table—these are the Lord’s blessings from Zion.
Throughout America and around the world, we see that faith and family stand and fall together. Conservative, devoutly religious persons have more children than their liberal and secular counterparts. Even within the church, mainline denominations have dwindled in part because their members are dying off without faithful children to replace them. Conservative churches have grown (or at least held their own) because their parishioners have had babies and kept more of those babies in the fold. The meek will inherit the earth, especially those humble enough to raise children.
In the end, having children is not merely an act of dogged obedience, or even simply an act of faith. It’s an act of transcendence. When I tell my child as he heads out the door, “Remember you are a DeYoung,” I am not only exhorting him to act in keeping with our values, I am sending our family name out into the world—into places where I cannot be and a future too distant for me to reach. “And I will make of you a great nation,” God told Abraham, “and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2). The Bible is full of genealogies that show that we are a people with a past and a future. When Genesis 5 traces the line from Adam to Noah, the refrain “and he died” is a reminder of the curse of death—but that each man had a son is a reminder of the promise that comes through birth (Gen. 3:15). The God who has put eternity into our hearts (Eccl. 3:11) also means to put children into the womb (Mal. 2:15). When we grasp one, we will grasp the other.
Kevin DeYoung is senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church, in Matthews, North Carolina, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte.
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The hearings of the January 6th Committee have flopped. Despite rave reviews from critics, audience reception has been tepid at best. Polling finds no indication that the hearings have changed anyone’s mind about January 6, 2021. Nor have the hearings resulted in any judicial action or big arrests.
The January 6 hearings fail as politics because they fail as television. They are a television event, in the same way the January 6 riot was an internet event. The committee retained ABC executive James Goldston, whose resume includes Good Morning America and Nightline, to advise on the production. And it is a production: This summer’s hearings formed a season-long arc, with episodes paced and plotted like installments of a streaming docuseries. Each begins with Chairman Bennie Thompson asserting the grand importance of elections; Vice Chair Liz Cheney follows with a teaser of the episode’s particular drama, invariably a description of the villain’s antics. Then committee members, a different one each episode, provide long-form narration.
Witness testimonies are arranged in a clear sequence and guided by scripted questions that highlight interpersonal conflicts and the emotional turmoil aroused by the events described. Interspersed throughout are pre-produced video segments narrated by junior investigators, featuring montages of recorded interviews, selfie videos, phone recordings, and 3D-rendered graphics representing the White House and other relevant locations. It’s extravagantly overproduced for a congressional hearing, but just about right for a multi-part TV series. The most superfluous segment in the summer season’s finale slowly zooms in on a CGI television playing Fox News in the digital diorama of the White House dining room. This confection is meant to drive home Congresswoman Elaine Luria’s riveting description of a man watching television for three hours.
Knowingly or not, the committee members struggle against this overproduction. A normal congressional hearing can make for great television (think of Adam Schiff and Doug Collins locking horns for the first Trump impeachment, or the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings). Those hearings arrest our attention because, as media theorist Marshall McLuhan explained, TV works best when it’s airing some public ritual. There is a possibility for common discovery and new revelations on both sides of the camera. The back-and-forth rhythm of cross-examination, the experience of thinking up an objection and hearing someone on your team raise it, the shared uncertainty about the outcome—all work well in the medium. Live hearings embrace TV’s inherent simultaneity. The drama moves from camera to living room at the speed of electrons, as the audience experiences the same thing at the same time as the people on the screen (Schiff’s earnestness, Kavanaugh’s exasperation). The simultaneity encourages solidarity between viewer and presenter—or in this case, citizen and official.
A “cool medium,” to use McLuhan’s term, TV characteristically demands energy from its audience. But instead of drawing us in as participants in a ritual, overproduced content asks us to sit back and take it in passively. This dynamic runs counter to the full potential of the medium. The organization of the January 6 hearings into predigested plot points suppresses the possibility of audience participation. It “warms up” the cool medium.
That’s a problem, and not only for the hearings’ appeal as a show. If the January 6 hearings can’t foster a sense of participation in a public ritual, they stand little chance of becoming part of America’s political life, or of shaping political opinions, as the Watergate hearings did in the early 1970s. The layers of content—rehearsed statements, interview montages, digitally generated scenes—distance the viewer from the presenter, highlighting the gulf between citizens and government officials, and thus reinforcing the alienation of many voters from Washington. There’s no audience stand-in—no representative of those who, in the moment, are coming to know shocking facts—on-screen. We only see a bunch of people lecturing.
Setting aside the content of the lectures, the highly produced format of the hearings sends the message that politics is a story other people tell you, and that congressional hearings and other ostensible fact-finding procedures are mere pretexts for that telling. Think what you will about the events of January 6. If these hearings are a token of our democracy, as the committee members insist, what are we to make of the fact that their narrative comes pre-packaged? Their format seeks to forestall uncontrolled outcomes, which is another way of saying that it seeks to suppress the participation of viewers.
Hearings are part of the work our representatives do, and TV can allow us to watch our representatives do that work in real time. But the TV version of the January 6 hearings doesn’t, in fact, let us watch in real time; and it would not be surprising if, in the minds of passive recipients of the packaged message, renegade thoughts began to emerge. A great deal of time, energy, and money were devoted to the production; one wonders whether these resources might have been better spent on the behind-the-scenes labor of assembling a strong enough case to justify arresting the former president. Or on, say, passing bills. Or something in the real world. Why the song-and-dance?
The committee makes a classic mistake: trying to address a problem with the form by intensifying the content. Since the committee took the time and effort to produce a big TV special, the members need to fight the suspicion that what they’re communicating is not urgent.
For some, the way to convey urgency is simply to tell the audience how urgent things are. Reps. Adam Schiff and Adam Kinzinger both stress repeatedly “how close we came” to the end of American democracy. This is a classic instance of “telling it” rather than “showing it,” which any editor will tell you undermines the power of communication. The committee’s primary strategy, however, has been to make the January 6 narrative resemble a salacious popular entertainment genre: the true crime miniseries. In that genre, the pilot episode starts the story in medias res, drawing in the audience with a moment of high drama, then backfills circumstance and motive. The hearings followed this approach, opening with testimony from Capitol police officers who described the explosion of violence. The story then backtracked to Election Day 2020, and from there walked the audience through an intricate conspiracy. Criminal mastermind Donald J. Trump, says Rep. Cheney, “over multiple months … oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated, seven-part plan.” All seven parts of the plan are covered by the hearings. One installment explains Trump’s “pressure campaign” to get Vice President Mike Pence not to certify electoral votes; one exposes his requests that the Justice Department issue a letter saying the votes were suspect; another reveals his demands that state election officials scrounge up more votes.
“These efforts were not some minor or ad hoc enterprise, concocted overnight,” Cheney assures us. “Each required planning and coordination. Some required significant funding. All of them were overseen by President Trump.” In instructing viewers as to how it all fits together, Cheney assigns a lot of active verbs to the former president. He “summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame.” He “summoned a violent mob and directed them illegally to march.” He “oversaw and personally participated in an effort in multiple states” to intimidate election officials. We’re meant to get the picture of an active and sophisticated conspirator, brimming with plans, forethought, and agency.
This picture of Donald Trump is less an inference from the facts than a necessity of the hearings’ docudrama format. The committee plotted its telling of this story, beat by beat. Such elaborate preparation is justifiable only if it accords with what it is depicting—only if Trump likewise dedicated immense forethought, deliberation, and expense to the events described. An “ad hoc enterprise, concocted overnight” wouldn’t deserve a seven-part TV extravaganza devoted to its explication. One expects Cheney would have described a “nine-part plan” had there been time and material for nine episodes, or a “five-part plan” had there been only enough for five. The medium, to use another McLuhan term, determines the message.
Yet the evidence the committee presents doesn’t fit the dramatic picture it paints of the former president and his actions. To state the obvious, Trump failed. All of America knows he failed. Each episode, explicating one part of the “seven-part plan,” reveals an institution the president failed to get on his side: the VP’s office, state officials, the Department of Justice, the Secret Service, even—in the tale of former White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson—the presidential limo driver. Nobody came on board with the “Stop the Steal” campaign, despite weeks of prodding and promises. Reality seeps through the slick production: There was nothing Trump could do, and he raged against his impotence.
By presenting evidence to this effect, the hearings can’t help but reveal the truth about January 6 and the president’s attempts to challenge and overturn the 2020 election results: The president, his closest advisors, and those supporters of his who led the charge on the Capitol were acting not from an abundance of agency, but from a dearth of it. The entire last hearing before August recess was about Trump’s inaction on the fateful day. He and his entourage did what they did because they felt there was nothing to do. They had no options, no plan, no cause, and no hope.
This despair is visible everywhere in the witness testimony, even if the committee never realizes its importance. The committee relishes a confrontational White House meeting three weeks before January 6, seeing it as so damning that it offers an hour-long play-by-play of the insults and the yelling. In this episode, we learn that Trump “told White House lawyers … that they weren’t offering him any solutions, but [Sidney] Powell and others were, so why not try what Ms. Powell and others were proposing?” And it wasn’t just the president. Trump campaign staffer Robert Sinners tells the committee, “as the road continued and as it was failure, failure, failure, that got formulated as ‘What we have on the table, let’s just do that.’” One of Trump’s advisors told an Arizona official to “just do it and let the courts sort it out.”
In the episode about Trump’s frustrations with state officials, the committee plays a clip of far-right internet personality Nicholas Fuentes saying to his streaming audience, “What are we going to do? What can you and I do to a state legislator? Besides kill ’em, although we should not do that—I’m not advising that, but I mean, what else can you do, right?” The committee cites this clip as a threat of violence. That’s not what it is. It’s an admission of defeat. Fuentes’s flippancy about violence shows what’s really behind it all: not a plan, not a conspiracy, but despair.
This mentality arises easily in minds trained by social media. Put something out there; let the algorithm do your thinking and planning for you; let the invisible processes figure out the result. Keep failing, keep tweeting, until something goes viral. “What do we have on the table? Let’s just do it.” The internet is an even “cooler” medium than television. It works only with constant activity, endless audience participation. On the internet, there is no content except what we generate ourselves. In the social media ecosystem, it’s better to have meaningless content than empty airwaves, which, of course, is why we have so much nonsense.
The internet is also more simultaneous than TV. In the online world, events and responses and counter-responses flow together into a single “discourse.” Committee members make much of the fact that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani insisted on seizing voting machines despite having no evidence that the votes had been rigged. But Giuliani probably expected the evidence vindicating his claim to pop up as the machines were being seized. Planning, deliberation, execution, evidence-finding, and vindication weren’t in sequence; all were envisioned as happening in the same instant. The same style of thinking brought us “Pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it” and “Invade the country to find the WMDs.” Faced with paralyzing complexity or a public culture jumbled by an ever-fragmenting media, we’re tempted to act and see what happens. It may be illogical, but more to the point, it’s non-linear—the kind of thinking electronic media trains us to perform, as McLuhan points out. This is your brain on the internet algorithm; shitposting becomes a means of doing politics.
On the night of January 6, long after the Capitol had been cleared of rioters and a full hour after Congress reconvened to certify the election results, LifeSiteNews posted an interview with one of the rioters. He is calm at first, but he grows more agitated over the course of the video, as if the exhilaration were wearing off. No less than six times in the seven-minute video, he asks, with perfect earnestness, “What were we supposed to do?”
Faced with the same dead end as their president, the rioters simply acted. Once inside the Capitol, they did the only thing they could think to do: post. They posted photos from Nancy Pelosi’s office, streamed videos from the Capitol Rotunda, and recorded videos of each other wandering the halls. They posted so much that dozens, hundreds of them were later identified when law enforcement used their social media posts to nail them. Did they think that posting about themselves would change anything? Who knows? Ultimately, that was the secondary concern. To an extent that the committee cannot admit, it was not an old-fashioned conspiracy, but rather the headless monster of social media that commanded the mayhem of January 6. A great deal of it was performed in order to be broadcast. Mission accomplished.
In the season finale, in good true-crime fashion, the committee constructs a minute-by-minute timeline of events, cutting back and forth between the White House and Capitol Hill in the hours between the initial breach and the late afternoon. It’s a tight script, but it’s anticlimactic, because there’s nothing to show. The main action isn’t action at all: For hours Trump sits in the dining room, watching TV, and for hours the rioters mill around aimlessly.
In my estimation, the emptiness is the real tragedy of January 6. The stakes were so low. Nobody seems to have believed that politics offered any scope for meaningful action, except insofar as politics means media spectacle. And if media spectacle is the most anyone—rioter or representative—can aspire to effect, then people will act with no reason, no plans, and no consideration for the common good. I find myself wondering: In what kind of country must Ashli Babbitt lose her life and Capitol Police endure beatings over selfies? In what kind of country does a true crime miniseries pass for a democratic process? The election was over. Donald Trump had lost. And everyone still sacrificed so much so that they could broadcast videos of themselves calling themselves patriots.
The committee won’t stare into this particular abyss because, like most of us, it’s not sure what to do with the internet’s role in the events of January 6 (and indeed, in our political culture broadly). One witness notes that “it feels almost silly to talk about a tweet.” (Is it any less silly to talk about a TV miniseries?) When it’s not silly, it’s sinister. Rep. Jamie Raskin, in episode seven, declares that “the creation of the internet and social media has given today’s tyrants tools of propaganda and disinformation that yesterday’s despots could only have dreamed of.” Kinzinger adds that “one of the best examples of the lengths to which President Trump would go to stay in power” is that he “scour[ed] the internet to support his conspiracy theories.”
This is a bizarre, precisely backward interpretation. Donald Trump did not concoct narratives and plans, then approach the internet for confirmation. It was the other way around; he was looking for something, anything that might help him get what he wanted. In this regard, he was well trained by social media. Unlike television, the internet is irreducibly simultaneous. There is no broadcaster-audience distinction. Online, Trump was no more in charge than anyone else, and no less a part of the audience than anyone else. At one point he told acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, “You guys may not be following the internet the way I do.” Trump experienced the internet as a source of knowledge about what to think, not as an instrument for buttressing an already laid-out train of thought. Saying “you guys may not be following the internet” is like saying “you guys may not be watching CNN.” It’s a charge that they are not well informed about what’s being said, what has currency.
Raskin and Kinzinger imagine that Trump used the internet the way they themselves are trying to use TV: to disseminate a ready-made narrative and a set of instructions to passive viewers. One cannot help but feel that the committee is concerned to shore up this older way of instructing citizens. The committee identifies the competing medium with seditious falsehood (“disinformation”). To anyone accustomed to a “warm” medium of well shaped content, all information transmitted by a medium as “cool” as social media looks like disinformation. (See the arguments over Covid masks and social distancing.) But this is an uphill battle in today’s media environment. The relative warmth of television—the possibility of crafting a single narrative for broadcast—makes everything on TV appear to Internet Man as propaganda. (Again, see Covid.)
The clash between TV politics and internet politics underlies the January 6 hearings. In truth, it’s what kicked off the whole mess in the first place. Presidential elections, at least as we now operate and present them, are the ultimate TV spectacles. Whether your horse is winning or losing, it’s exciting. Republican or Democrat, you’re glued to the screen with everyone else, learning the outcome along with the people onscreen. Everyone reacts to states being called, projections being made and modified, tallies going up as the evening rushes to the finish line. It is TV at its “coolest,” a nationalized and all-encompassing public ritual, overriding all local and interpersonal forms of politics.
The internet creates different expectations and habits. It too demands participation—not by citizens of a nation who are witnesses to events unfolding before them, but by nodes in a network that itself is an event. And this network has less patience for procedure. Viewed from online, a televised public ritual looks like propaganda, and the TV audience is not actively participating in but passively downloading a message written (like the internet’s algorithms) behind the scenes. Someone in a precinct in Miami tweets, and the network absorbs his claims, while others post. The social media network sees itself as ahead of the curve, more informed, less beholden to “the narrative.” Whether this perception is accurate or inaccurate, and whether the mental habit it produces is good or bad for us as a people, it has had real, concrete effects. To Internet Man, the very fact that the 2020 election was a TV event marked it as propaganda. It was fake—not just the reporting, but the event itself. Trump asked Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, “Why wouldn’t you want to find the right answer, Brad, instead of keep saying that the numbers are right? … We just want the truth, it’s simple.” The numbers on TV are real, Trump admits, but they are not the truth, which is to be found in the blizzard of social media where Internet Man imagines the real truth-tellers offer shocking revelations.
The baby boom generation expected TV to usher in a more perfect form of participatory democracy, encouraged perhaps by McLuhan’s prediction that it would render us a “global village.” But for a half century or more, elites have used TV to disseminate narratives and instruction, not recognizing (as did McLuhan) that these activities more befit print or film. Our elites have learned to manufacture consent. But sustaining TV as a “hot” medium becomes far more challenging when an obviously “cooler” and more participatory medium breaks its monopoly, shattering the consensus point of view into vast, uncontrollable networks of speakers and fact-finders.
The populist right and the dirtbag left have revived the demand for participatory democracy. For them, participatory democracy looks like the networks of discourse and organization found online, rather than electoral politics. They don’t accept that national elections made for TV reflect the will of the people. They generally suspect there’s some production happening in the background, whether it’s the Democratic Party apparatus marginalizing a leading candidate in favor of a senile member of the establishment, or state-level RINOs connecting voting machines to the internet so that Italian-Venezuelan hackers can switch votes. Some of these suspicions may be accurate; many are obviously not. But as a country we must deal with the truth they reflect: Online Americans reject the mass-man model of politics that TV has kept on life support.
There’s reason to hope the internet will facilitate forms of political life that the TV age suppressed. We need new channels for political participation, so that we may de-emphasize large-scale mass events and restore local communities and interpersonal organizing. The made-for-TV January 6 hearings push in the opposite direction, and in all likelihood they will further divide the country, not because of their obvious partisan animus, but because they double down on democracy as an alienated spectacle, suppressing audience-citizen participation rather than informing it.
Any way forward to repair our country’s tattered political culture requires acknowledging that Online Americans are restless. Left with no means of productive engagement, they too easily descend into nihilism. We cannot address this danger by treating democracy as a lecture. On the surface, the January 6 hearings are about Donald Trump and January 6. Their real subject, however, is the agony of television politics, frightened as its practitioners are of the internet politics that threatens to replace it. Season two airs this fall.
Philip Jeffery is a deputy opinion editor of Newsweek .
Image by Robert Course-Bakervia Creative Commons. Image cropped.