The Founders Didn’t Predict TikTok—But They Did Predict Demagogues

If you missed it, The Atlantic just kicked off a 250-year gut check on the American experiment, and Fintan O’Toole opened with a hard truth: our debates about the Founders often sound like a ventriloquist act. We move our lips to say what we want to hear. The package is solid—timed to the November 2025 issue and a bigger series they’re calling “The Unfinished Revolution.” (Published October 8–10).

The part that hit me? His point about the public square. Madison and friends didn’t just draft structures; they drafted habits. Read widely. Argue in daylight. Keep the press noisy and plentiful. O’Toole notes how the Founders were cranky, sometimes petty, often wrong—but big on thinking out loud, in public, with receipts. A republic of readers, not spectators. And that’s where we’ve face-planted. Local papers are gone. Algorithms turning disagreement into a demolition derby. National Leaders in many nations brand the press “the enemy of the people.” None of that squares with Publius. It spits on him.

I’ve worked in rooms where the morning show was your local front porch. You’d hear the mayor, the high-school coach, and someone selling boiled peanuts in the Winn-Dixie lot, all in the same hour. Messy? Always. But the mess came with context. You learned your neighbors’ names. Now, too many towns have a Facebook group standing in for a newsroom and a rumor mill standing in for a city desk. The Founders weren’t saints, but they were pro-infrastructure—roads and newspapers. We kept the interstates and strangled the obits.

O’Toole also pokes the sacred cow of “originalism”—our habit of pretending we can read 18th-century minds like today’s Slack logs. It’s tidy. It’s also cosplay. The Founders changed their minds constantly. Jefferson warmed to a Constitution he didn’t want. Madison flipped on a bill of rights and then wrote the thing. Flexibility wasn’t a weakness; it was maintenance. The quote that won’t leave me alone: equality as a promissory note. You don’t frame a promissory note and call it a day—you pay it, again and again, in policy, in access, in who gets a mic.

And yes, the piece drags modern politics into the room—tariffs, culture-war pulpits, and the executive blob that swallows the other branches whole. If that sounds melodramatic, read Hamilton’s warnings about demagogues who “commence… as crowd-pleasers and end as tyrants.” We were told. Loudly.

Here’s where I net out—media hat on:  if we want a republic that lives up to its press clippings, rebuild the commons where arguments can breathe. That means:

Local news you can touch (and subscribe to).

Platforms that reward context, not carnage.

Leaders willing to lose a news cycle to tell the truth.

Citizens who read beyond their team.

The Atlantic’s project is a good spark—thoughtful, broad, built for readers. Use it. Share it. Then go throw ten bucks at the outlet that still covers your school board with a human in the chair.

Otherwise, we’re characters in the funhouse mirror O’Toole describes—loud, distorted, and convinced our reflection is the real thing.

Question for you: What’s one local news source you’d pay to keep alive—and what would your town lose if it disappeared?