The problem is that we know too much
Even if the US was never quite the land of the free, it helped that most people believed it was, writes Tyler Cowen
As problematic as "fake news" is, and as dangerous as the label can be, maybe "true news" is equally corrosive. The world is giving us more reality and more truth than we can comfortably handle - and that, as much as the lack of a common enemy since the end of the Cold War, may explain the decline of the liberal world order. Fake news, after all, has been with us for a long time, whether in the form of overly optimistic dispatches from the Vietnam War or reports of Paul McCartney's death. And that's not counting the under- or unreported stories we now know to be true, on such things as Kennedy's affairs, or Reagan's dementia. Back then, you couldn't even google the right answer - yet somehow we coped. What we did have, at least in the US and most of the West, was a relatively well-centred culture, which gave people perspective and a series of unifying national "myths". Even if the US never was quite the land of the free and the home of the brave, it helped that most people believed ...
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