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Vox’s Zack Beauchamp recently published a plaintive lament [ [link removed] ] about the absence of ideological training and career promotion for young “liberals”—by which he means opponents of the current trend toward authoritarianism:
Last week, two young liberals [at a conference for liberals] asked for help finding a job in the ideas industry. And I didn’t have a great answer…. What’s really missing are programs of a specific kind—ones that help college students and recent grads engage with Big Ideas and connect with Important People.
This observation really resonated with me. I was at the same conference and found myself next to someone who worked with a big foundation, so I spontaneously pitched exactly the kind of training and development program Beauchamp is talking about. But the guy I was talking to seemed a lot more interested in getting people to make TikTok videos than in spearheading any training on big ideas and how to think and write. Yet it strikes me that being a charismatic talker on social media is downstream from the more difficult task of having something to say.
Beauchamp argues that the problem is that liberalism is a victim of its own success: “There wasn’t much of a need for liberal donors to create programs to cultivate liberal thought, as people interested could simply go get a Ph.D. or an entry-level reporting job.” He criticizes the narrowness of the kind of professional training you would receive as an entry-level reporter. But you might also notice that such jobs for reporters have also largely disappeared—as have many other jobs involving the intersection of politics and ideas.
The Great Disintermediation
There was once a whole media industry centered on the world of writing. It was an industry of books and newspapers, of course. But for the kind of ideas we’re talking about—the ability to connect current politics to philosophical arguments about the nature of government and our ideals for how a society should work—the central forum was the magazine. The magazine article was a format that allowed for timely commentary on the news of the day, but also for some degree of intellectual depth. A magazine could also create the kind of connections where a young writer would work with seasoned intellectuals who were his or her editors and could join a fellowship with other contributors that would open up new opportunities.
This system was not just for young people starting out. For the established professional, it meant that there was a varied industry of ideas, and if one magazine went under—as they occasionally did—there were plenty of others to turn to. But that industry is dying and has been for a long time.
This is partly due to the impact of the internet. My career as a writer, spanning from the mid-1990s to today, coincides neatly with the impact of the internet on the ideas business. I’ve found that it had two positive impacts and two negative ones.
On the positive side, the internet knocked flat the barriers to entry. The old world of newspapers and magazines contained many strong institutions—but to get a foot in the door, you had to get past a lot of gatekeepers, and if you were like me and a little bit outside the mainstream or the usual political categories, that could be difficult. Now anyone with a cheap laptop can go online and publish. And if you have any talent, there’s a good chance you will get noticed.
The internet also made the ideas business more open to those who live outside the big media centers. There was a time when, if you wanted to be taken seriously in talking about the big issues, you pretty much had to work in New York City or Washington, D.C. But if you work “on the internet,” you can live anywhere, including a lot of places where it’s much cheaper than in the big cities.
These advantages are counteracted by two big costs. The first is that everyone got used to getting all their information for free—and they lost the habit of paying for the words they read. Of course, they weren’t necessarily eager to pay writers in the old days. We like to think people bought newspapers for our cutting insights and deathless prose. But more likely, they bought them to look at the job postings, the classified ads, the sports scores or the movie listings. These are the things that brought in the money to pay the writers, but the “Great Disintermediation” of the internet era decoupled them from the ideas business, depriving it of its biggest and steadiest sources of revenue.
Poisoning Your Brain on the Internet
But perhaps the worst impact is that people became used to hearing only what they want to hear. The audience became slaves of the algorithm, which would make sure to feed back to them a steady stream of affirmation of whatever they already believed. Many writers became the algorithm’s slaves, too, chasing after whatever seemed like it would give them greater reach in Google searches or on social media.
The feedback loop created by the automatized yes-man of the algorithm tends to push people into positions that are a more purely distilled version of wherever they started out—and then, eventually, into a distorted self-parody of them.
In a development worthy of fiction, the most prominent examples of this are some of the Silicon Valley moguls who helped create the internet in the first place—then promptly poisoned their brains on it. Hence the spectacle of Marc Andreessen, who helped write one of the first web browsers, radicalizing himself on group chats [ [link removed] ]. Or there’s Peter Thiel, in an unhinged Financial Times op-ed [ [link removed] ], celebrating the prospect that the internet will re-open all of the conspiracy theories, from Jeffrey Epstein back to the Kennedy assassination.
Perhaps the most poignant example is Mark Zuckerberg, who bought Instagram and since then seems to have been personally colonized by it. As the New York Post summed it up [ [link removed] ], “He’s grown his hair out into a modified mullet, ditched the hoodie for trendy Balenciaga T-shirts and prominent gold chains, and taken to wearing a $900,000 Greubel Forsey watch.” All things that are more worthy of being posted on the ‘Gram.
These men are all just a few steps behind the guy who literally poisoned his brain on the internet. According to a report in a medical journal [ [link removed] ], this unnamed patient asked ChatGPT for a substitute for salt in his diet. It recommended sodium bromide, a toxic chemical that eventually induced [ [link removed] ] “paranoia and hallucinations.” This is where we are all eventually headed if we’re not careful.
The Calvinball Commentators
The other reason for the decline of the ideas business is the very same authoritarian moment that it has enabled.
I noticed this while working as the token classical liberal at a conservative magazine during Donald Trump’s first term. Normally, the victory of a Republican president would be a boon for such publications, because they would have the prospect of being able to catch the eyes and ears of people in positions of actual power. An idea hatched at a think tank could make it through a magazine article to someone in the administration or Congress and be turned into policy. But that was back when people in power actually read the magazines.
The strange thing I noticed about Trump, by contrast, is that he was bad for conservative magazines. Why? Because he didn’t read them, he didn’t care about them, he didn’t need them and he viewed them as a threat. After all, National Review had attempted to circle the wagons against him [ [link removed] ] in the 2016 primaries. Magazines are full of people who care about facts and ideas and logic and consistency, and that makes them dangerous for someone as mercurial as Trump, who can declare a policy one day and reverse it the next. Ideas don’t follow his whims.
Donald Trump doesn’t need intellectuals with ideas. He needs sycophants. He needs people willing to spin a rationalization for whatever he did this morning, then spin a totally contradictory rationalization for whatever he decides to do in the evening. In a recent Supreme Court dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson came up with the best term for this [ [link removed] ], comparing the majority ruling to “Calvinball,” a fictional game from the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip in which there are no fixed rules, but one constant imperative: that all the rules will be interpreted to benefit Calvin.
This is the sense in which Beauchamp is wrong to envy the intellectual infrastructure of the right, because its actual ideological content is very shallow and dispensable. The Trumpist right needs TikTok and social media, but it doesn’t require much in the way of sustained argument just to declare that Mussolini is always right [ [link removed] ]—excuse me, that “Trump Was Right About Everything [ [link removed] ].”
Can the Ideas Business Be Revived?
What do we have today as a center for the revival of the ideas business? Certainly, Substack has taken up much of that role, but it is atomized and siloed. Everyone has his own newsletter behind his own paywall, usually with no backing from or connection to a larger organization. We are missing much of the role of the magazine, which was not just a platform on which to be published, but a regular source of income and audience, and a community that could pull its readers together and bring its writers into conversation with each other.
I can’t say that I know for sure what the solution to this problem will be or how to put the pieces of the old fragmented “liberal” media system back together. But we need to at least confront the problem.
In this era of rising authoritarianism—with federal troops now literally occupying the nation’s capital—the fundamental rebuilding we need to do is not just political but intellectual. As the old institutions fade, so does our ability to think about the big picture and deliberate about our world. We’re already feeling the consequences, and we need to rebuild that capacity.

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