Why America Feels Like a Lawless Society

What Happens When the Law Stops Mattering? A Democracy Becomes a Failed State

You don’t have to look very hard to see just how broken America is. Its institutions are badly, badly worn, its systems don’t work, and pessimism prevails. And yet of all the causes we often discuss, I want to highlight one that isn’t so often discussed. A hidden reason for American collapse — one that’s hidden in plain sight, because, well, it’s just taken for granted at this point.

It’s a little subtle, so let me begin with an example. Did you read the expose in the Post about Fox News? It was quite something. As it turns out, 

Emails and texts show that Fox’s hosts and executives knew the claims being peddled by then-president Donald Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell weren’t true — some employees privately described them as “ludicrous” and “mind blowingly nuts” — but Fox kept airing them to keep its audience from changing channels.

Hence, Faux News is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems — because it appears that it peddled Trump’s Big Lie “with malice,” meaning that Fox appeared to know it was a lie. So it went ahead and repeated the lie that Trump had “really” won, but voting machines were part of a conspiracy to “steal the election,” as the theory goes, basically so that Trumpists wouldn’t get mad at it. 

“You just don’t often get smoking-gun evidence of a news organization saying internally, ‘We know this is patently false, but let’s forge ahead with it,’” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah professor who specializes in media law.

Now. How egregious is that? Well, very. And yet we all know that this is the kind of thing that Fox does all the time. Its forte isn’t news — it’s the not-so-subtle dogwhistles for hatred, the constant driving of people into a mania over them, the peddling of persecution complexes. Anyone who’s ever lived abroad — in a country without a Fox News — will tell you just how astonishingly damaging it’s been to the cause of American democracy. So.

Why doesn’t the government ever step in? You see, the failure that I want to discuss in this little essay is the breakdown of the rule of law. It’s one thing for Dominion to sue Fox News for libel — no, the “election was stolen” isn’t true. But it’s another for the government to sue it. Should it?

If you’ve ever lived abroad, especially in Europe, you’ll have noticed that regulators do this kind of thing all the time. They’re vigilant, proactive, they don’t back down. And yet in America…the government itself is totally out to lunch when it comes to regulation.

What should a country do when a force is just there maligning it’s democracy, spreading big lies about it, and earning huge profits in the process? Well, it should be regulated. That’s not just my idle opinion. It’s what, for example, the FCC is for. You see, just as in any other country, broadcasters have to get licenses. And those licenses come with terms. Chief among those terms is the public interest — maintaining it, or at least not harming it.

So why is it that Faux and its ilk just get away with violently abusing the public interest? Because the government is failing miserably at the task of regulation. And that is one it’s most basic jobs.

If you think I’m kidding, or exaggerating, consider just some of the broad powers it has. 

In 2005 Congress passed the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which empowered the FCC to increase fines for indecent programming tenfold. The FCC’s power to regulate indecent programming continues to engender controversy, as the agency faces off against CBS and other media entities in high-profile First Amendment lawsuits.

 The FCC does — LOL — get involved when people…say bad words. When there are…nipple slips. But lie to malign democracy? To spread hate? To engender bigotry? To incite violence? And that appears to be perfectly OK with it.

That’s not OK. Not in a democracy. The guardrails are there for a reason. And no, that’s not some kind of authoritarian overreach. You don’t get to drive without a license, right? If you drive drunk, if you hurt someone delibrerately, guess what? Your license gets revoked. Precisely the same logic applies here — the airwaves, just like the highways, are a public good. There they’re for all of us. Not just Rupert or Tucker or fanatics or lunatics. That’s like crazy MAGA trucker convoys driving down the highway every single evening, and stopping traffic dead. Not OK. In the very, very specific sense of “this harms the public interest.” How on earth can it be possible that saying a four-letter word will get the FCC on your case…but spreading hate and violence won’t?

You see my point perhaps. Americans often think they don’t have laws. That’s not quite the case. They need better ones, true. But right now, one of the Big Reasons why America’s so broken is that nobody enforces the laws already on the books.