In Progress

Democracy’s Dark Arts

America’s founders tried, and mostly failed, to solve the problem of truth in an emergent media environment. The book follows about a dozen lives — from Benjamin Franklin to Abigail Adams, from Thomas Paine to Mercy Otis Warren — through the question of what a republic does when it cannot agree on the facts.

The argument moves in three stages. First, the men and women who made independence discovered that a free press was not the same thing as a truthful one. Then, as they wrote constitutions, they tried to build institutions that could survive in a world of unreliable information. Finally, those institutions were tested — by the politics of slavery, by partisan newspapers, and by the Sedition Act — and most of them broke.

This is my second book. Publisher and publication date forthcoming.