Brian Beutler published what he thinks is the best speech given in recent times by a nation’s leader. It happens to be from French president Emmanuel Macron in Germany:
We are under attack from outside. We are under attack from enemies of democracy. We need to recognize this.… When propagandists from authoritarian regimes attack our public spaces and social networks with disinformation, we are under threat from outside. When authoritarian regimes come to spread their messages, we are threatened from outside. But we would be very naive not to see that from within, we are turning against ourselves….
We have allowed a democratic public space to develop where everyone is hooded and anonymous, where the rule is that you have to insult others if you want to be popular, where you don’t know, in this public space…whether you are dealing with real people or fake people, and where you give equal value to someone who shouts much louder and tells you: ‘This vaccine is not a vaccine. What you are telling me is false and spreads the worst kind of misinformation.’ We live in a public space that looks like this. How can you expect there not to be immense democratic fatigue and people increasingly heading towards nervous breakdowns? I will put it more bluntly. We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies….
Look at the epidemic of mental health issues and eating disorders among our teenagers and young people. It is entirely correlated with the emergence of these social networks. We have allowed public spaces to develop where everything is done to prevent reason, since, ultimately, the order of merit is that emotion is superior to argument and that negative emotion is superior to positive emotion. This is a complete bias towards our democracies going to extremes, towards noise and fury prevailing over reasoned argument, towards music quickly disappearing to make way for shouting, and towards algorithms designed to promote cognitive excitement, overreaction, and the volume of what we like or dislike, again favoring extremes, because at the heart of these models is the monetization of your presence in order to sell it to advertisers.
We did not design our democracies for this. We are a long way from the democratic agora of antiquity. And so, if we Europeans do not wake up and say, ‘We want to take back control of our democracies,’ I can tell you this: within 10 years, all those who are playing on or with this [digital] infrastructure will have won. And we will be a continent, like many others, of conspiracy theorists, extremists, noise and fury. If we believe in democratic order, let us put science and knowledge back at the heart of things, let us put scientific authority back at the heart of things, let us put culture, education and learning back at the heart of things, let us protect our teenagers and young people from these social networks, let us give these social networks rules so that they have, in a way, the same rules as those of the democratic space, meaning that there are no hidden people, meaning that there are no fake accounts creating false excitement. And let us enforce the same rules. When you have a newspaper, you are responsible for what is published in it. When you have a social network, you must be responsible for what is published on it. Otherwise, racism, anti-Semitism and hatred of others will triumph on our continent. We have the means to rebuild a 21st-century democracy. We just need to take that leap. It’s up to us to do it.
He’s not wrong.
Beutler notes that one other leader who has come close and it will surprise you:
The closest contender would be Joe Biden, who echoed Dwight Eisenhower in his own farewell address: “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead…. President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us then about, and I quote, ‘the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power….’ Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.”
Last night Elon Musk was back at Mar-a-lago partying at Trump’s table.