The arrival of Donald Trump in Washington has changed many things about the nation’s capital and how it operates. One of the most elemental of those is its metabolism. That became clear to me early one morning just weeks after the 2017 inauguration. It was a few minutes before dawn, and I was getting ready to pour the day’s first cup of coffee when my iPhone started buzzing on my kitchen counter.

The way platforms currently conduct content moderation has been delegitimized, and new forms of governance will need to emerge to meet the demands of the moment. Semi-independent and transparent self-regulatory oversight mechanisms offer significant advantages. As the actors closest to the front line, platforms will always need to play a significant role in drawing lines for online speech, given the high-volume, fast-moving and context-dependent nature of the decisions involved.

Many of the Left’s recent policy proposals are not only quite radical, but scientifically, economically, and numerically illiterate. They are crowding out discussion of serious proposals to deal with the legitimate issues raised. A closer look reveals, for example, that Medicare for All and the Green New Deal wildly violate the laws of supply and demand, physics, and arithmetic.

The tension between the concepts of “civilization” and “the forces of history” can be tracked around the world from deep antiquity until at least the early 20^th century. Since then, for many political reasons, neither the idea of civilization or historically transformative forces has been considered worthy of attention or even to possess intellectual legitimacy for serious world leaders. This may now however be changing as, for example, the European Union’s disregard for the continent’s civilization (as in the determination not to refer to Christianity in its draft constitutions) has troubled many.