Rebuild Civilization
America’s cultural subcommunities are fracturing. We lack a coherent, shared value system, not a judgment on which values are right, just an observation that the center isn’t holding.
The philosophical problem of what happens when a society loses its shared first principles is no longer abstract. It is visible in our public life. The first and most crucial premise for any nation is a shared understanding of individual responsibility: to oneself, to others, and to the state. When Americans aren’t taught how to think, regardless of whether that education is secular or religious, the wedges between subcultures widen from differences into chasms. A republic this fragile cannot function on that footing.
This isn’t new. The attack on shared civilization by nihilism has been building for decades. A society that fails to teach citizens how to reason, question, and evaluate evidence should not be surprised when the habits required for a healthy social contract begin to erode. Locke’s foundation for that contract was simple: before civil society, we begin as equals with no natural claim over one another. Locke described men in the state of nature as “by nature, all free, equal, and independent,” bound only by consent when they join civil society. It is consent, not birthright or force, that legitimizes government. When citizens stop being willing to reason together in good faith, the consent that holds the whole structure up starts to erode.
My premise is simple: those of us fortunate enough to have received an education carry a responsibility to spread the tools of clear thought as widely as we can.
Picture two spheres overlapping. On the left: the average American citizen. On the right: our constitutional republic and what it needs to function, educated, service minded citizens. The overlap is shrinking. Conspiracy theories and nihilism toward sex, money, and relationships have eroded a secular society that was never built to run on law alone.
The fix starts with one move: put the fighting parties in the same room and lock the door.
Right now the two major parties aren’t speaking the same language. The way back to a shared vocabulary runs through rebuilding public space, the role cable news used to serve. An information environment is never neutral. It either builds room for real dialogue or it grinds shared values to dust.
This isn’t a new invention. It’s a return to something we already knew: culture matters, truth matters, and the ability to argue in good faith matters.
That’s why the Fairness Doctrine needs to come back, updated for today’s media.
Some numbers, so this isn’t just nostalgia:
The FCC adopted it in 1949, requiring broadcast licensees to cover controversial issues of public importance and present contrasting viewpoints, with wide latitude on format. Formally adopted as an FCC rule in 1949, the doctrine required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest and to air contrasting views.
In 1959, Congress wrote it into the Communications Act itself, not just FCC policy. Congress amended the Communications Act in 1959 to require that broadcasters “afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance.”
The Supreme Court upheld it unanimously in 1969’s Red Lion Broadcasting, ruling no broadcaster has an exclusive First Amendment right to the airwaves it is licensed to use. The 1969 Red Lion decision upheld the FCC’s fairness authority after a Pennsylvania station denied response time to a man it had characterized as a communist sympathizer.
It wasn’t heavily punitive. Only one broadcast license was ever revoked over a Fairness Doctrine dispute.
Reagan’s FCC ended it in 1987 by a 4 to 0 vote, arguing it chilled speech rather than encouraged it - yet President Reagan could not have foreseen the state of “news” today. Our top “news” sources are all legally registered as “entertainment,” because their unpatriotic owners are aware they are not sharing facts or truth. In hindsight, our nation greatly benefited from hearing both liberal and conservative ideas on all major news outlets. Those who fear such a regulation, are ideologues and too insecure in their own beliefs to let them stand on their own.
On August 4, 1987, the FCC abolished the doctrine by a 4 to 0 vote under Chairman Dennis Patrick.
Congress tried to save it. Congress passed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act of 1987 to codify the doctrine, but Reagan vetoed it, and Congress couldn’t override.
One more attempt died in 1991 when President George H.W. Bush threatened another veto.
The doctrine operated for 38 years without collapsing the broadcast industry or silencing dissent. It died not because it failed, but because deregulation era politics decided the marketplace would sort it out. The marketplace didn’t sort it out. Cable news and algorithmic feeds did the opposite.
The Individual Mandate: Refuse Dishonesty at the Kitchen Table
Policy fixes like the Fairness Doctrine matter, but they operate at 30,000 feet. Practice has to start at the smallest unit: family, church, friend group, the people across the table from you.
Stop protecting people from disagreement. Protect them, not their ideas. People must be protected from discrimination. Ideas get no such shield. Once you declare a belief system immune from criticism, satire, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible. Apply that at home. Your brother’s conspiracy theory, your aunt’s political certainty, your church’s unexamined assumption, none of it gets a pass because it’s family.
Kill “I’m entitled to my opinion” as a conversation ender in your own house. That phrase is one of the most effective tools of denial in use today. Invoke community, religion, or culture, and disagreement slams shut. That’s not a tactic reserved for cable news panels. That’s your dinner table every time someone shuts down a hard conversation instead of engaging the argument. Don’t let it close. Push, gently, every time.
Practice truth telling where it costs you something. Foucault’s test for real courage: it’s the speaker willing to say something dangerous, different from what the majority around him believes. Truth telling that costs nothing isn’t the virtue this moment calls for. The real test is whether you’ll say the uncomfortable thing inside your own tribe, church, unit, or family reunion, where it actually risks something.
Be ruthless with ideas, kind to people, starting with yourself. You don’t get to bully your uncle into silence, but you don’t get to let his bad argument stand unchallenged out of politeness either. Self deception is still deception. If you catch yourself believing something because it’s comfortable rather than because you tested it, the same standard applies to you first.
The bottom line: the solution is not to agree. It is to argue again, in good faith. That’s not a policy prescription. It’s a personal discipline. It doesn’t wait on Congress or the FCC. It starts the next time someone at your table says something you know isn’t true, and you decide whether to let it pass or push back.