My mother did more for me than I can even imagine. Every day I wish she were here so I could tell her something she did that made my life better. High on the list would be that she read to me every day. Some of my earliest memories are of her, book in hand, reading one story after another as I begged her for “just one more.” This was before television, long before the internet and the ubiquitous smartphone that has digitized our lives into a series of zeros and ones. I have never lost my passion to read “just one more” good book. I even grew bold enough to write one, and I’m about to publish a second book by the end of next month. It isn’t just successful athletes that can say “thanks mom.”

“So what?” you might ask. “Why should I care?” Political commentator Andrew Sullivan gives such a good answer that I’m going to summarize his recent newsletter to finish this post. You can read his entire blog (Our Post-Literate, Post-Liberal Era) and subscribe to his newsletter HERE.

At The New Republic when I was editor, one day the business manager, if I recall, decided to bring up a weird subject at the weekly editorial conference.

What did we think we were going to do about this new thing called the Internet? If discourse went online, as everyone seems to think it will, what would happen to the magazine?

I remember saying that if the web was what it seemed to be, then magazines would surely cease to exist, because they depended on a weekly or monthly group of writers and articles, held together, by paper and staples. Take the paper and staples away, and nothing coheres in the same way. So we’re doomed, I confidently said.

But something else soon became pretty obvious to me: if images and video could be as accessible online as words, they would always win any contest for eyeballs. Visuals carry more visceral punch than sentences and paragraphs, and require less reason and effort. Words would endure, of course, but they would increasingly be spoken and heard, not written or read. The Internet, in other words, held the power to return us to the pre-literate culture from which a majority of humans had emerged only a few hundred years ago: images, symbols, memes. The art of mass deliberation, rooted in reading, reason and thinking, and only really in operation for a couple of centuries or so, was in danger of rapid obsolescence.

And that was well before social media and the smartphone.

What I failed to consider was how this would have a huge cultural and thereby political effect that would shake the reasoning and deliberating foundations of liberal democracy. It meant we would think and read less, and see and feel more. It meant our attention span would attenuate to make long-form reading rarer and rarer. And that, in the end, would matter.

A brilliant little Substack essay last week reminded me of all this in a flash. James Marriott helps you see how a post-liberal politics is deeply related to a post-literate culture. Deep reading is in free-fall everywhere in the developing world, as the smartphone has hijacked our brains. Professors at even elite colleges are finding their students have lost the ability to read at length and in depth; talking has replaced reading; images have replaced ideas; engagement has supplanted reflection; and the various cognitive skills that reading once conferred to the masses since the printing press are fast atrophying.

No wonder global IQ levels are now falling for the first time. No wonder the reading scores of American high-school students are the worst since 1992, according to a new report. No wonder the next generation communicates in memes, not words, let alone sentences. AI is surely compounding this even further, allowing you to have an increasingly sophisticated bot read something for you. College itself, as a period when you devote yourself to long and deep solitary reading, is becoming obsolete:

No wonder that Gen Z and younger — having been denied the solace of knowing actual history, experiencing serious religious faith, and being transported by big, complex novels into other distant minds and places — feel adrift, searching for meaning and perspective, lost in phones, prey to cults. Trans-furries and budding neo-Hitlers: an emotive, irrational, grievance-obsessed generation of lonely souls — increasingly prone to violence.

One reason Trump is president now is because all this made his ascendance possible. A post-literate president rose through the irrational, emotive Twitter revolution, with social media simultaneously making it hard to gain any perspective, overcome any emotional trigger, or concentrate for more than a couple of minutes.

You want a perfect example of a post-literate moment? Ponder the UN speech by President Trump this week. Even written down, it was “the weave” — a series of unconnected rants and digressions, baseless assertions and unseemly insults, a stream of addled and angry consciousness with no real relationship to coherence, or reason, or persuasion.

Imagine the head of a small country standing up at the UN and saying:

I’m really good at predicting things, you know?… I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.

We’d all be embarrassed, no? It would go viral as a cringe clip. But since this absurd, meandering thug is the US president, we let it go.

Or consider this gem:

In the United States we have, still, radicalized environmentalists, and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. No more cows. “We don’t want cows anymore.” I guess they want to kill all the cows.

Yeah that’s right: stop all the factories and kill all the cows. If that august body was aghast, it was because few had ever witnessed, outside a comedy movie, the head of state of a country speak like that before: no dignity, no coherence, no real argument as such, just loopy madlibs and inappropriate outbursts: “Your countries are going to hell!” The America whose values many across the world once aspired to is now, in its public posture, coarse, irrational, emotional, petty. It’s a global joke. It’s up there with a Sacha Baron Cohen performance.

And then we remember a core truth of this president who so perfectly represents us, something that could not have been said about any other predecessor. Trump has never actually read an entire book. He rarely even reads the daily intelligence brief. He needs pictures and images and people to talk to him. He picks his staffers because they look the part. He darts and lunges this way and that in his policies like a distracted animal: unreasoned, impetuous, feral.

We may be witnessing not just our first post-liberal president. We may be staring at our first post-literate one as well. More, no doubt, are on their way.