The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
What Elon Musk has done to Twitter, what Newsmax does to "News" on TV, what "meme life" seems to do to all of social media with a constant stream of "now down to 10 seconds or less" celebration of quickly recognized patterns and media references. In 1995 he was basically saying we would slip back into what we had pre-science in some form.
It isn't just 2023 with Elon Musk and Twitter to X that "lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority" like Musk or even the leaders of Reddit.... people meme and spam and say curse words to spez, but that's not really "knowledgeably question those in authority"... people are reluctant to create something better in a sense of goodness. And Sagan with his Pale Blue Dot book and poem was not afraid to define goodness.
It's like clickbait journalism, people complain about it, but a platform like Reddit or Lemmy front-ends the news, people can write better headlines and organize the news in sincere descriptions... but it doesn't happen. People react to the clickbait and mock it, and that's sort of celebrating it.
I think the metaphor of a candle in the dark was pretty good, candles are subject to rain and don't really give off that much light. When you read the book you are left with the impression that we haven't accomplished as much as we hoped. "when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few"... technology isn't science, and understanding. We had the technology power of vaccination but we had so much disinformation and misunderstanding. "unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true"...
I think that speaks for his concern, the general population, the audience, the everyday people who aren't in some massive concentration of power. And how scientific method was a kind of super-democracy, and his Pale Blue Dot perspective on people fighting wars and dominating each other.
The full book Pale Blue Dot is well worth a read too. Humanity can choose to do better, but since 1995 we haven't really strived for it. We have way more technology, but we seem to lack a concept or choose leaders of 'goodness to share'. Our trends in political and business leaders and teachers says a lot about us.