For one thing, while not everyone reads novel-length tracts or deep introspective literature, today, a vastly greater number of people than ever in history are able to read, and daily do indeed read a considerable volume of words, ranging from the banal to the entertaining to the modestly intellectual and beyond. The evidence that this reading, even if much of it is short and very succinct, is somehow worsening cognitive performance than reading fewer things but of greater length, is shaky at best so far.
Secondly, having more people than ever be able to read is still better than having a small percentage of the population be literate and reading deeply, while a vast majority can read barely anything or nothing. Since all declines have to be measured against some baseline or relative to some historical level, I have a hard time believing that there is even a decline of reading or anything making politics much dumber given that at any previous time, it was the case that fewer people read.
If anything, the seemingly more intellectually robust political discourse preserved to now from history represents a minority of all (mostly blathering) political discourse, and even in the case of that limited quantity of reasoned discourse, was aimed more at a limited audience of watchers, while completely excluding most people.
Finally, having spent years reading about history and its political elements (and their typical discourse) from the time of Rome to the present, I see nothing to make me think it's been dumbed down. If anything, the political propaganda of earlier decades and centuries was absurdly stupid, pig-ignorant and hateful by modern standards, but worked better on its contemporary audiences, who had much less access to such a vast flood of information, than does modern political propaganda on modern audiences.
Secondly, having more people than ever be able to read is still better than having a small percentage of the population be literate and reading deeply, while a vast majority can read barely anything or nothing. Since all declines have to be measured against some baseline or relative to some historical level, I have a hard time believing that there is even a decline of reading or anything making politics much dumber given that at any previous time, it was the case that fewer people read.
If anything, the seemingly more intellectually robust political discourse preserved to now from history represents a minority of all (mostly blathering) political discourse, and even in the case of that limited quantity of reasoned discourse, was aimed more at a limited audience of watchers, while completely excluding most people.
Finally, having spent years reading about history and its political elements (and their typical discourse) from the time of Rome to the present, I see nothing to make me think it's been dumbed down. If anything, the political propaganda of earlier decades and centuries was absurdly stupid, pig-ignorant and hateful by modern standards, but worked better on its contemporary audiences, who had much less access to such a vast flood of information, than does modern political propaganda on modern audiences.