It may be true that “democracy dies in darkness,” but it can also be wiped out in blinding light. If Donald Trump is reelected, it will have been 20 years after the launch of Facebook and 18 years after the launch of Twitter—less than one generation for the “greatest invention for democracy” to be the proximate cause of the death of democracy.
When I started writing this blog in 2012, the 5th of November was celebrated by internet defenders who seemed to think that Guy Fawkes of the English Powder Plot of 1605 was a rebel and a hero. This fallacy was based on conflating history with the graphic novel and movie V for Vendetta, whose tyranny-fighting protagonist wears a “Guy Fawkes” mask, which became the symbol of hackers calling themselves Anonymous. Then, by extension, the mask became a symbol of advocating John Perry Barlow’s idealistic notion of the morally superior, purely democratic internet against the anachronistic laws of “weary” republics.
Of course, the real Guido Fawkes had more in common with the January 6th insurrectionists than any champions of democracy. The intent of the Powder Plot, led by Robert Catesby, was to restore the authority of the Catholic Church, which would have killed the nascent progress of republicanism in England. In this light, the plot was one of many forebears to American Christian nationalists, eager to have Trump blow up the secular administrative state the same way Fawkes & Friends were supposed to blow up Parliament and the Protestant monarch in one move.
As often happens in history, the catastrophe of the Powder Plot was averted by individuals listening to their own better angels. Uncomfortable with killing any Catholic members of Parliament, the conspirators sent an anonymous letter to Lord Monteagle, who dutifully reported the plan. Thus, Fawkes was found in the cellar waiting for the signal to light the 36 barrels of gunpowder, which would have indeed blasted all of Parliament, King James I, and the king’s family into the River Thames. How this conflagration might have altered the course of American history—and, therefore, democracy in general, is impossible to know, but it is doubtful that the Puritan adventure beginning in 1620 would have transpired in the same way, if it happened at all.[1]
In contrast to gunpowder, social media is an insidious weapon that erodes the foundations of republicanism from the virtual cellar occupied by our lesser angels—steadily degrading not just truth, but the value of truth.[2] This was not every platform founder’s intent, of course. Jack Dorsey appears to have had a late-stage realization of the damage Twitter could cause, but it is not at all surprising that under the control of Elon Musk, the rebranded X does not even pretend to “beg forgiveness” for its manipulations of reality.
The architects of the American Constitution and leaders of the Federalist cause understood that direct democracy was synonymous with chaos. When they used the word democracy, it was almost pejorative, referring to a heedless mob that might swallow the pursuit of “ordered justice.” In short (and with the possible exception of Jefferson), they recognized that too much democracy would be fatal to sustainable democracy, but this is exactly what social media has fostered—a form of direct democracy undermining a collaborative understanding of the American experiment.
Even if Trump loses, the project of restoring the cultural foundations of the American Republic will be far from over. As author and journalist Sebastian Junger said at a conference I recently attended, the project is generational—one that must begin now to benefit our grandchildren. Hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center (HAC) at Bard College, Junger was one of several speakers who offered a critique of the Left from within the Left—exemplifying the kind of discussion I believe is essential, but which social media makes nearly impossible. In fact, Junger specifically blasted “the phones,” focusing primarily on their addictive qualities, but clearly in regard to platforms creating and exacerbating political divisions.
That discussion on the Left will only happen if Trump loses. If he wins, chaos will ensue followed by reactions to that chaos, and it will be hard not to shrug at, or even endorse, extreme reactions. After all, Trump promises violence and fascism, which will spark violent responses that are both natural and justified. But if that nightmare is not our fate, then the project of saving democracy from latent authoritarianism will require the work of Liberals and Conservatives, who must confront the fact that social media has been the indispensable catalyst in reshaping a concept of America that would tolerate, let alone almost elect, a manifestly dangerous individual to be President.
Sustaining any republic requires policy that fosters reasoned compromise behind the theater of politics, but thanks to the free soapboxes in every citizen’s hand, all policy is now political, and all politics are now performative. Social media softened the ground to create the ideal landscape for a populist charlatan to rise to power despite (or even because of) his open hostility for the Constitutional order. But Trump’s supporters are not alone in abandoning that faith.
Even before the revelations of 2016 that data gathered from modest online activity could be weaponized to engineer political outcomes around the world, it was clear that the narcissism inherent to using social platforms provoked acute, often poorly articulated, outrage—including responses to rumor and conspiracy with no foundation in fact. That folly is not unique to any ideology or political party because it is a psychological relationship to the medium itself that we are far from resolving.
Then, with the addition of powerful actors who control the data and algorithms, a significant, albeit hard to measure, number of world-shaping events have been triggered by what amounts to online pranks. Even the most ambitious and most powerful democracy ever invented has been punked to the edge of extinction by the dark arts of internet trolls. All those tech boosters who claimed there was a wall of separation between adolescent cyberspace and adult real life were simply wrong.
Social Media Platforms Are Narcissism Machines
By coincidence, I recently met one of the student fellows at HAC, who is visiting Bard from Ukraine and studying human rights. Noting that there will not be another election in her country unless and until they win the war with Russia, she referred to a frustration with her contemporaries, who as young Americans, do not intend to vote this week. I asked if those students offered reasons for their reluctance, and she told me the two main explanations that came to mind were 1) that the outcome didn’t really matter; or 2) that if the candidate they vote for “let’s them down,” they will feel guilty about having cast the vote.
The first sentiment that voting doesn’t matter is a familiar cynicism of youth. But what the second sentiment implies is a heightened degree of narcissism that I believe is fair to associate with the digital-native generations. The notion that any President could be perfect in the administration of that unfathomable office suggests first, a childlike innocence about human beings and the complexly dangerous world we occupy; and second, an arrogance that one’s own idea of “perfection” is well founded. This is an astoundingly naive way to evaluate the mere mortals we might elect to be President of the United States, though it is consistent with the kind of “purity-test” mentality that shapes the rhetoric of the digital-native generations.
The phenomenon is observable in real-time because social platforms are venues where political allies become irreconcilable antagonists the moment a member of the tribe dares to criticize the tribe’s thinking or conduct. The critic becomes the apostate, earning herself at least a virtual, if not a literal, stoning. Examples abound, but in this moment, I am thinking specifically of progressive activist Brianna Wu, who has the integrity to criticize the extremism, antisemitism, and ahistorical narratives animating many anti-Israel protestors and, consequently, is bombarded by personal attacks and death threats from people who consider themselves liberal or “progressive.”
Those responses, like many of the protests themselves, are narcissistic and performative. The American Liberal repeating the mantra “settler colonialism” is barely distinguishable from the Conservative who claims that Christianity is under attack in the U.S. There is no intellectual, let alone moral, difference between the Right’s generic attacks on DEI and the Left’s attacks on Jews in academia and in their private lives. But again, the common denominator is social media, designed and managed to stoke, promote, and reward righteous outrage, not discourse.
Unfortunately, social media draws everyone into its gutter. While I believe that a figure like Trump could never have obtained political power without the insane environment of these platforms, even rational opposition cannot afford to cede the alligator pit as a battlefield. Although Harris, other candidates, and brave Conservative apostates do not engage in the outlandish, incoherent, and fascistic messaging exhibited by Trump, merely fighting fire with fire on social platforms demands a juvenile and sad derivative of the discourse that wrote the nation into existence. It is a meager dividend from our investment in the “greatest tool for democracy ever invented.”
Waiting to find out whether Trump will be reelected is like waiting to learn whether the nation has Stage IV cancer. Everything is on hold while millions of Americans ask the same question, albeit from different perspectives: are we at the brink of civil war? In this regard, there are not two sides. Specific policies notwithstanding, Harris means a continuation of the American experiment and the possibility that we can at least try to have difficult conversations on both the Left and Right. Trump means chaos and who the hell knows what comes next? If we manage to dodge the bullet, maybe, just maybe, we can admit that social media was the gun that fired it.
[1] Civil unrest would likely have ensued, but if Rome were indeed reinstated, it’s entirely possible that anti-Catholics like John Winthrop would have been executed rather than allowed to establish New England.
[2] It is not only Trumpians who are immune to counterfactuals in their world view, and although social media does not cause this human frailty, it does exacerbate it.
Image: N. Currier. (1846) Destruction of tea at Boston Harbor. , 1846. [New York: N. Currier] [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/91795889/.
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