Tag: Election 2016

Democratization is Killing Democracy

Burning Male Protesteron Fire Shouts at Riot Act on the Streets.
Photo by stevanovicigor Pond 5.

 

I’m not sure what further evidence we need to finally declare the “information revolution” a fiasco. If the mind-boggling reality of electing a president who normalized hate speech with his campaign is not sufficient evidence that the digital age has failed to produce a more enlightened electorate, it’s hard to imagine what it would take for progressives to accept that the web hasn’t done us any favors. Yet the internet industry will keep insisting that what’s needed is more. If we just digitize more, provide more access, and harvest more data, the promised enlightenment is still within our grasp.

In the age of Less, conservative meant an author and scholar like William F. Buckley. In the age of More conservative means a cult troll like Milo Yiannapoulous. In the age of Less, there were three TV networks whose news divisions were both unprofitable and mandated by law, making them honest brokers of responsible journalism that didn’t have to compete with show business. In the age of More, a meme or a tweet will suffice because the “mainstream media” cannot be trusted. In the age of Less, expertise and dedication to purpose counted for something. In the age of More, anyone can be anything, a mashup video can be filmmaking, a cut-and-paste blog can be news, and a know-nothing thug can be President of the United States.

Donald Trump is—among many other things—the result of caring more about democratization than we do about democratic republicanism. As readers who’ve known this blog from the beginning are aware, it was the anti-SOPA campaign that got me started—less so because of the copyright issue than what that campaign said about our political process in the digital age. People were so convinced they were right about the bill that they didn’t bother to consider the larger implications of how social media and Big Data could so dramatically override the more contemplative and nuanced process of representative government. Now, with the victory of a guy like Trump, it should be clear that democratization does not in any way have to result in a benevolent society. There is no wisdom of crowds.

The utopian pretense of “disrupting the gatekeepers” in order to make the world’s information and culture freely and widely available is—in addition to stealing the work of authors—a complete fallacy as a social good. Every American who voted for the least-qualified and most obnoxious candidate in living memory had ample access to information, but to what end? This is what comes from treating all expression as “content,” as more fuel to run the data harvest for the data industry. The promise of technology has led even progressives to place so much emphasis on tearing down “elites,” that they should not be surprised when fools win the day.

The courts said Google is free to digitize a corpus of literature in order to serve a society that doesn’t read. “Digital rights” groups work to keep copyright weak in the service of the “free flow of information,” which inadvertently equalizes the social value of the poet and the fascist. More “information” is no more the answer to democracy than “more speech” was when SCOTUS ruled in Citizens United. Historically, less—what some call “artificial scarcity”—has produced the benevolently influential outcomes I want to believe most people still hope for. After all, the reason thousands mourn the passing of Leonard Cohen today is because there is only one Leonard Cohen.

Democratization is governed by the economy of trending, and trending is garbage—producing circumscribed experiences, as my colleague Mike Katell rightly points out in his blog. He writes, “While we’re busy pontificating (myself included) on social media about our views and sharing our carefully curated information tidbits with our online followers and friends, remember that this narrowly focused information sharing is a central problem for political discourse.” Trending is glib. Donald Trump just trended his way into the White House with all the intellectual virtue of a mean-girl tweet.

Ironically—perhaps even counter-intuitively—the information age has produced a climate in which American politics is no longer a competition of ideas, and factions on both the right and left are equally guilty of feeding that monster. Not only is the bubble naive, it is also grossly inaccurate. But what now?

It’s true that Trump welcomed hate into his campaign and has yet to say anything to quell that fire. And when we read about high school students already harassing minorities, this conjures legitimate fears of American Brown Shirts—a history that itself seems somehow lost despite the free flow of “information.” Through the filter of social media, it’s hard to avoid the anxiety and very hard to distinguish between being vigilantly informed and hysterically manipulated.

As indicated in a previous post, I know that if my neighbor voted for Donald Trump on Tuesday, it’s not because he’s a KKK member or a neo-Nazi. I want to believe there are more of him than there are of them—that perhaps the litany of horrors populating my Facebook feed this week is not an accurate reflection of the sentiments of half of America. But there is no getting past the sense that democratization has helped make our politics more divisive not less—that the promise of connection through technology hasn’t really panned out as the great campfire many predicted. To the contrary, it’s more like a car fire in the middle of a riot.

Democracy Officially Improved by Information Age

FB 1800

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.