Democracy Dies in Darkness

The world is choking on screens. Just as this book foretold.

Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” at 40 is truer than ever.

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(Illustration by Joseph Rogers/For The Washington Post)

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By Ryan Zickgraf

Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, from which this op-ed was adapted.

It’s now almost a reflex: An election is held, and someone pushes the big, red Death of Democracy panic button. When Donald Trump won in 2016, liberals saw a gold-plated Adolf Hitler in a red baseball cap. Then Joe Biden took over and conservatives warned of Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot reborn, an America where your kids would be forced to go to gay camp and pray to RuPaul before lunch. (They’re panicking again with Zohran Mamdani in New York’s mayoral race.) Now, we have Trump redux. The hysterias flip, but the impulse stays the same: to imagine top-down tyranny as a looming catastrophe.

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The comments reflect a range of perspectives on the impact of screens and technology on society, with some expressing concern over the addictive nature of social media and its potential to distract from meaningful engagement with the world. There is a sense of nostalgia for... Show more

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