With the inevitability of Donald Trump’s nomination as the GOP candidate for president, I think we can officially declare the “information revolution” a rollicking success, don’t you? When the savants and silicon pioneers of the 80s and 90s predicted that the Information Superhighway would be a great leap forward for democracy, I don’t remember anyone intimating that we would ride that highway to the demolition derby that American politics have since become. The unlikely, populist rise of an arrogant billionaire, whose monosyllabic campaign is textbook authoritarianism, is merely the latest extreme example suggesting that information is utter bullshit. Without context, without reason, without compassion and empathy, information is meaningless no matter how much its volume or speed of delivery may increase. Rarely, in all the theater of our post-internet politics, can it be said that Americans have been splashing about in the tide pools of ideas any more than we were 200 years ago, when information moved at the speed of the printing press and horse.
The image above refers to the highly-contentious campaign between Federalist John Adams and Republican Thomas Jefferson in 1800, in which the factions supporting these two founding fathers slung ugly at one another in ways that would have made shareholders at CNN wet themselves with pure Cristal. Donald Trump’s circus of vitriol is amateur hour* compared even to the pundits of 1800. As one writer for the Connecticut Courant wrote of Jefferson, whose deism was the focus of many a Federalist concern, …
Look at your houses, your parents, your wives, and your children. Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames, hoary hairs bathed in blood, female chastity violated, or children writhing on the pike and the halbert?
That’s the real stuff right there. All Trump did to launch his campaign was insult every hispanic on earth. But in 1800, the villain who was going to see to it that your women were violated and your children murdered was none other than the author of the Declaration of Independence himself. And according to the book Presidential Campaigns by Paul F. Boller, Jr., whence these stories come, a Connecticut woman really did try to hide her family Bible with a Jeffersonian friend for fear that the new president’s goons would soon be coming to confiscate and destroy it—her logic being that, “They’ll never think of looking in the house of a Democrat** for a Bible!” (Sounds like a theme we’ve heard for the past eight years regarding Obama and guns, no?)
Jefferson’s views remain central to the ongoing, constitutional debate on the separation between religion and state—a passionate argument that still produces behaviors as preposterous—if not more preposterous—as the woman hiding her Bible from the president. American Christians in 1800 were apt to believe that Jefferson would end religion altogether in the United States—a falsehood that was largely manufactured by the Federalist party and Christian leaders, who relentlessly blasted Jefferson’s supposed atheism. And Jefferson was not above firing back with some exaggeration himself, arguing that if, as magistrate, he were to declare national days of thanksgiving and fasts (as Adams and Washington had done), that the nation might as well reverse the revolution and return to rule by the English monarch, who was literally the head of the national church. The separation issue, for Jefferson, was central to the rationale for republicanism itself—an idea not without historic merit, but a nuance lost amid the emotions of the public.
It had been less than a decade since the ratification of the Bill of Rights, and the realities of governance had already divided the heroes of the revolution and framers of the Constitution into snarling factions. And though there was real animosity in many cases (e.g. the Federalist Hamilton hated Adams’s handling of the presidency), the public perception of the candidates’ true beliefs and ideas was as distorted by emotion and as exploited by the opposition as it is today. And these were the dudes who invented the country! Had there been Twitter and Facebook—had information moved as fast then as it does now, it is conceivable that the new and tenuous republic—which had not yet tested most of its constitutional principles—might not have withstood the heavy onslaught of utter nonsense that today aggregates so much empty-headed outrage into tangible political forces.
In getting to the real question, though, as to whether the internet has been good or bad for democracy, it’s hard to deny that it has certainly made what was already bad considerably more effective, which was never openly imagined in the ebullient, early days of the digital revolution. It seems pretty clear now that groups and individuals who were previously and properly relegated to the “lunatic fringe” have coalesced via networked communications into bodies of political force that draw completely new—yet generally regressive—boundaries of political ideology.
The downside of “democratizing” the dissemination of information is that anybody gets to play and that anybody really does mean anybody. And because it is the nature of the internet to connect people to the information they want to know and then connect like-minded people to one another, we might have expected that the lunatic fringes of both the left and right would congregate at either end of the pole and give rise to new political factions among digital natives—factions that cannot properly be defined as classically liberal or conservative, democrat or republican. And they like it that way.
Among the extreme left, we have the social justice warrior types—the ones who see micro-aggressions in every interaction, demand safe spaces on college campuses, refuse to read assigned classics they find “triggering,” and who use terms like cultural appropriation and patriarchy as excuses for disengagement while claiming to respect diversity. They are insufferable people, who have managed to use the privilege of their educational opportunities to invent new forms of cultural segregation, beginning with mandatory self-flagellation by all white, heterosexual males. Naturally, the SJWs, as they are called, are an internet phenomenon; and their antagonists, the alt-right, also found one another in cyberspace. Both sides have grown up expressing their political sensibilities in the intolerant lingo of Trollish; and the one aspect they seem to have in common is tribalism. Their sublimation of the individual for the sake of the hive is unquestionably a reflection of their digital nativity, and it is a quality that confounds sensibilities among both democrats and republicans for its inherent un-Americanness.
Jack Hunter, a conservative writing for The Daily Beast about the alt-right, describes a foggy space between troll-like behavior reacting to the identity politics of the social justice warriors and the extent to which that rhetoric inevitably finds kinship with honestly-meant white-supremacist views. Hunter writes, “ … the heart of alt-right tribalism leads to something that is definitively anti-libertarian and functionally authoritarian. The alt-right is characterized by an extreme collectivism that is unavoidably racist.”
When Donald Trump declares without a hint of nuance that, “PC in this country has gone too far,” he successfully rallies both the troll and the real racist to his brand of intolerance. In many ways, Trump’s nationalist theatrics are a thuggish version of the optimistic and reactionary campaign run by Ronald Reagan in 1980—invoking a nostalgia for an idyllic America that never existed–unless one views as utopian the kind of innocence that would play in the fog of DDT trucks, picnic at the edge of nuclear test blast zones, and demand that the races and sexes remain neatly organized into their “rightful places.” But the important shift in tone from affable Reagan to boorish Trump brings groups like the KKK, Neo-Nazis, and the openly racist alt-right out of the shadows and into the mainstream of national debate. Meanwhile, the Bernie-or-Bust crowd—many who would be voting for the first or second time—seem to have decided that if we cannot attain a new socialist utopia in the next four years, they’re just going to pack it in.
Certainly, there are many interrelated and complex reasons why our politics are the way they are, why they have always been this way. In a sense, I suppose we have to admit that the digital revolution has been “good for democracy” to the extent that vox populi is louder than ever. Whether or not the voice is saying anything we can call progress is whole other question.
* Since the publication of this post, it is fair to say that Trump’s rhetoric has exceeded the hyperbole of the past.
**The Republican Party of Jefferson would later become the Democratic Party, but it was common to use the term in general discussion prior to the official change.
