Glenn Beck and other reactionaries claim they want to turn the clock back. But only on certain issues.

It is an impossible dream. The only way we could turn the clock back to the times these dreamers think were so great would be to turn everything backward.

You can’t just take one element of change and turn it back, because change is all interwoven, especially the changes in media. The things they want to “change back” didn’t come about in isolation. It was all part of all the changes in our lives, and each affected the other.

We would have to get rid of Twitter, Facebook, the Internet, cable TV, satellite radio, etc. Glenn Beck and the other right-wingers would have to confine their rantings to radio.

It is ridiculous to think things can ever be turned back. The communists in Russia and China tried, and all they ended up doing was making their societies incompatible with the rest of the world. And that lasted just two generations. But the cracks—and there are always cracks—in the political-isolation walls allowed change to sneak in until the government could no longer keep denying it.

We can’t go back again. A society can’t just accept part of it and deny the rest. It’s impossible.