Fight ‘til we See the Sunlight
In a rare showing of bipartisanship, the House of Representatives voted on Wednesday — by a vote of 352-65 — to compel the sale of the popular social media app TikTok from its Chinese government-controlled parent company ByteDance under penalty of banishment from U.S. app stores. Put more simply, ByteDance would have six months to sell TikTok to a non-adversarial entity or it would become illegal for the app to be available for download in the United States.
While I’m an avid social media user — mostly just Facebook and Twitter because in internet time I’m roughly a million years old — I can recognize the damage it has caused to our culture. There was a meme going around in 2016 that said something like “Our parents in 1996: Never trust anyone on the internet. Our parents in 2016: I saw on Facebook that Hillary Clinton invented AIDS.” Similarly, I saw one recently that was like “Scientists in 2004: Guys, we just landed a robot on Mars! Scientists in 2024: Guys, for the last time, the earth is round.” I think a lot of our, uh, recent unpleasantness can be traced back to the idea that there are a lot of almost pathologically distrustful-yet-credulous people who fancy themselves skeptics and are thus willing to believe most anything as long as goes against “the establishment,” whatever they believe the establishment to be. It’s a dangerous combination to have a critical mass of people willing to believe all manner of banana-crackers ideas together with amoral social media companies willing to meet that demand with no concern of possible societal detriment. And that’s giving guys like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt that they’re merely amoral. When the proprietor of the company is actively hostile to the United States, it becomes a different matter entirely. Which is to say, if Elon Musk were literally in hock to, say, the Russian government [rather than merely being a disordered manchild “just asking questions” to his millions of followers] Twitter would be more than just a time-suck with a net-negative influence on American culture, it would be an honest-to-God national security concern.
It’s concerning that something like 170 million Americans use TikTok, and worse, “get their news” from it. You may remember back in the fall when there was a rash of TikTok-ers suddenly realizing “this Osama bin Laden fellow sure does have a good point about America!” I get apprehensive about that sort of thing, particularly in an election year. That’s not to say that banning TikTok would improve the culture — I think I’m on record enough at this point saying that the quality of the culture is ultimately the responsibility of the people — but it would at least no longer be to the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party.
There’s been some snarking that Congress can’t do anything to actually help the American people, but it can magically get it together enough to act against a social media app. Meh. Usually I’m pretty suspicious of widely bipartisan legislation. It’s probably just a symptom of my disposition, but I don’t generally care for Congress coming up with ways to “help” the American people — I don’t think they’ve earned enough of our trust to take on that sort of responsibility. Let’s start with something concrete like, y’know, preventing one of our foremost geopolitical adversaries from having access to the personal data of 170 million Americans. The fact that this effort enjoys such bipartisan support despite being a popular product leads me to believe that the concerns about TikTok are actually understated. It’s probably worse than we think.
I understand the frustration of those who actually like TikTok and see a usually hopelessly-dysfunctional entity suddenly spring to action only to be a buzzkill. But I’ll take wins where we can get them. Similarly, there’s been scoffing along the lines of “Why should I care if the Chinese steal my data? I don’t care if they know I watch a lot of basketball clips.” Well, it’s not really about you, per se. It’s about the aggregate. Having data on 170 million Americans is an incredibly wide net to cast. It’s a virtual certainty that there is someone among TikTok’s user base who works for the United States government who is also susceptible to blackmail or foreign influence.
I also find myself unpersuaded by complaints that “it’s not very free market to use the power of the federal government to force the sale of a social media company you don’t like.” Perhaps, but TikTok isn’t exactly a product of the free market, either. This is more an interaction between two hostile governments.
And while it’s a rare moment of bipartisanship for a bill of this magnitude to pass with such broad support, it’s also an interesting form of bipartisan opposition. The Democrats who oppose the effort mostly do so because TikTok is extremely popular among young people, who are a vital cohort in their political coalition. There’s also an element of, y’know, a certain brand of leftist having overlapping motives as the Chinese Communist Party, so…ahem. A smattering of Republicans voted against it, some because they’re crank libertarians who don’t think Congress should do anything to affect anything that could plausibly be considered free enterprise or free speech [see above], but most because opposed it because they’re simply Trumpist automatons and Donald Trump has recently come out in favor of TikTok because, uh, Facebook is an enemy of the people, y’see — and surely unrelated to the fact that a TikTok stakeholder is also a Trump megadonor who is supposedly being considered for Treasury Secretary in a future Trump presidency. It’s a strange phenomenon where the sort of nationalist populists that support Trump would rather fight domestic opponents to the benefit of foreign adversaries than find themselves on the same side as domestic opponents at the expense of foreign adversaries.
It’s no fun having to be the adult in the room, but such is the life we conservative types have chosen. TikTok, in its current form, is bad for America and in such a way that makes it worse than the also-bad American social media companies. Remedying those concerns would be an improvement for the country, and that is always a worthwhile endeavor.
What He Said
There’s a reason Nick Cattogio, nee Allahpundit, is one of the most respected writers and political analysts of this era and I’m some guy writing blogposts for his buddies. But he put into words an idea that I’d only been grasping at thus far about what it is that so bothers me about the prospect of a second Trump administration. As I said:
Now, I’m not one of those who thinks that electing Donald Trump would be the end of American democracy or whatever. Electing Donald Trump wouldn’t mean the end of America in any literal sense; we would still live our lives, have elections [at least for a while…ha, haha…], etc. But I think it would be the end — or at least a hiatus — of something rather important about America. About our, uh, maturity [?] for self-governance. It would certainly mean something untoward about the American people, or at least 45% of them. It’s one thing to take a flyer on Donald Trump when he was something of an unknown quantity. It’s quite another to have witnessed his term as president and the iniquities that followed and then affirmatively choose him again.
But let the professional take a crack at it:
To me, an “endorsement” requires a certain amount of earnest enthusiasm for a candidate and their program. I endorse Nikki Haley for president. I don’t endorse Joe Biden.
But who the next president is matters less to me than who the next president isn’t. Reelecting a man who tried once before to smash the constitutional order and who shows all indications of trying again would mean the end of America as we’ve known it, without exaggeration. Whether or not it would “destroy” the country in the sense that civil order would break down, it would amount to a popular repudiation of the classical liberalism on which the constitutional scheme is based. To absolve him for January 6 by restoring him to power would be to condone Caesarism as a model for American government, inescapably.
You can’t elect an authoritarian demagogue vowing “retribution” against his enemies and scheming to co-opt arms of the state to his own vindictive ends and still credibly posture as “the last best hope of earth.” The disillusionment felt afterward by those of us who imagined we lived in a country nobler than that will be unfathomable.
Americans will never recover from it. No amount of wheezing about the genius of the Founders or the majesty of the Constitution after the Trump era ends will obscure the painful truth about what this country has become once that truth has been unmasked.
In a democracy, a country is whatever its people wish it to be. The institutions in which those people take, or used to take, such pride are a bequest from earlier generations, and bequests can be disclaimed. A vote for Trump is a vote to disgorge the American inheritance.
“THIS,” as the kids say.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Literary Characters
Clue: Col. Sebastian Moran was the evil sidekick of this Sherlock Holmes nemesis.
James Moriarty
Today’s clue:
Category: British Royalty
Clue: In 1559, she signed the Act of Supremacy establishing the monarch as head of the Church of England.
Dispatches from the Homefront
My older daughter likes showing off new things she’s learned [no idea where she got that], and the other day she excitedly tells me “Daddy, I can name all eight planets in the solar system!”
“You can?!” I asked, excitedly. But then I thought to myself “…wait, eight? …oh yeah, that’s right…”
Pour one out for Pluto, RIP to a real one.