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After reading an excellent piece by Thomas B. Edsall in The New York Times ( The Rise of the Smartphone and the Fall of Western Democracy [[link removed]] ) this morning, I scrolled—as I often do—to the comment section. The first comment stopped me cold:
“Extremity always regresses to its norm, but once in a millennium obliterates it: behold novus ordo seclorum.”
I don’t know who wrote it—perhaps a retired classicist or a Political Philosophy, professor—but the phrase stuck in my mind. Extremity regresses to its norm, until it doesn’t.
That feels like our moment.
We’re living through a time when political and emotional extremity no longer recedes into moderation. It metastasizes. The digital world—our phones, our feeds, our endlessly scrolling lives—has created a new kind of political physics: one that accelerates feeling faster than any institution can absorb it.
What follows are a few reflections on how we got here, why liberal democracy feels so brittle, and what this new novus ordo seclorum—the “new order of the ages”—might mean for the future of political life.
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The Death of Mediation
Liberal democracy, at its best, depended on mediation—on distance between emotion and law, between outrage and power. From John Stuart Mill to Jürgen Habermas, the liberal tradition assumed that the public sphere worked because it slowed things down.
Growing up in the 1970s, life—like the media—moved more slowly. The mediating influence of trusted newsmen like Walter Cronkite mattered. Everyone watched the same two or three nightly newscasts, which ended with a clear boundary between information and speculation, between news and noise. There was no 24-hour cycle demanding outrage, only the daily rhythm of shared facts and limited airtime.
Ideas were debated. Institutions processed conflict. Citizens had time to cool their passions before casting a vote or passing a law.
That distance has collapsed. The smartphone is now the central organ of our political nervous system. What once required deliberation now travels from the limbic system to the global stage in seconds. Journalism, law, and governance—institutions built for slowness—are drowning in unfiltered emotion.
Hannah Arendt warned that when the boundary between public and private life dissolves, politics becomes a theater of reaction. That’s precisely where we are: everything is instant, visible, and combustible. We’ve lost not just civility but the time it takes to think.
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