Democracy Under Siege

 

History repeats itself, often in a strikingly similar way.
Democracy lasted 250 years in ancient Athens until privilege, corruption and mismanagement strangled it.  American democracy, is now approaching 250 years, and it is desperately ill.
Democracy is under assault.
We may think that these clashes are an aberration,
a Mar-A-Lago Mussolini thing.
But they are actually part of a troubling dichotomy
that seems to be intrinsic to democracy itself. 

Democracy is more than a bundle of laws, norms and institutions.
It is an open culture of communication. 
Democracy affords people the right
to think, speak and act
and it allows every possible means of persuasion.

Going all the way back to Plato's Republic,
it's understood that the seeds of democracy
include the roadmap to destruction in it's very DNA.

 It's understood that every democratic society
 is inescapably vulnerable to the consequences of communication.

We may not like it, but something like Jan. 6 is always waiting in the wings.

It will be tragic if we have faith in a liberal fantasy which envisions
that we can impose reliable guardrails against dangerous deceptive speech.

Among other methods of communication,
social media is destroying democracy at a historically fast pace.
Online platforms allow the spread of rumors and half-truths more quickly than ever before.
The way their use is implemented generates homogenized tribes.
But is this not what a bewilderingly cumbersome democratic culture must look like?

Dependent upon the communications environment,
a democracy can foster reliable, respectful norms and laws,
or it can de-evolve into outrageous propaganda, widespread cynicism
and vitriolic tribalism.

When communications have devolved into propaganda and partisanship,
a democracy can either end with breathtaking  speed,
as it did in Myanmar when the military overthrew the democratically elected government,
or descend more gradually into chaos and authoritarianism
as Russia did under Vladimir Putin.

Since the defeat in 2020 of the daft swollen orangutan, his fanboys have embraced the “big lie” and tried to restructure state laws to control future elections.
You might say this is a brazen attack on democracy itself and you'd be right,
 yet it’s also a glimpse of democracy stripped of all liberal restraints.

While it would be nice if democratic politics yielded to the preferences of measurable public opinion and reflected the will of the people, it would be better still if we were guaranteed protection by our civic and legal institutions, binding the rule of law to society with accountability and fairness.
The truth is, democracy is not static and it's not stable.
 It is not a given, and it is not guaranteed.

Far too many people assume that liberalism and democracy are one and the same.
That certain standards and practices like respect for minority rights and the rule of law
 are wired into the political system when in fact they are just conventions
that matter only to the extent that citizens care about them.

The past decade demonstrates that there are no inevitable outcomes and no assurances.
 Not all sides will play by the rules.
 The paradox at the heart of this debate is the idea that
democracy contains the ingredients for its own destruction .

Free expression and its sometimes troubling consequences
 are a feature, not a bug.
What sometimes changes are novel forms of media,
which come along and empty democratic space for all manner of subterfuge. 

Patterns of bias, distortion, and propaganda
accompany each communications development. 
Cinema and radio
furnished the artistic milieu
of a vibrant culture in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s.
Yet Nazi concentration of media in the 1930s
 under Joseph Goebbels
also became the pathway to world war and genocide.

While television could bring the public closer to its leadership,
the logic of the medium also rewarded political figures
as different as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
Each time new forms of media emerged,
people, inevitably, used them for different ends
 ---- to shore up a flourishing democratic society
----- and to destroy it.

 For more than a century,
knowledge has been created and mediated
by major national TV networks and newspapers.
This had anchored a discourse driven by norms, codes, and fairness practices.
Over time,
this generally eroded
as holes were found and exploited. 
However, this deluge of social media in the 21st century
has collapsed that arrangement of norms entirely
and it has been used as a tool to undercut democracy.

This may be inevitable.
To fortify democracy,
leaders will have to defend the rule of law,
even if they risk political blowback
or death threats from anti-democratic cultist devotees. 


 
In the end, the only way to confront a seditious conspiracy
 is to prosecute the criminals. 
Democracy’s claim to superiority over other political systems
is that it offers free expression and the opportunity to confront arbitrary power. 
The good news is that our system has shown itself to be resilient:
Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election were repulsed.
 That’s a victory for American democracy.
 But like every democratic victory,
it was and is 
 provisional.

As long as there is democracy, there will be demagogy.
The ability to check power remains just that:
an opportunity.