Trumped: democracy in the Ideas Era Part 1

Only in America ?

Nov 12, 2024

With the re-election of Donald Trump the adage, “Once bitten, twice shy” was convincingly vanquished by “There’s a sucker born every minute” in a cage match. While the pundits discuss the match, this post is about the arena. In a couple of days, I’ll post about the cage.

“Only in America can a…” traditionally preceded a boast that irritated the rest of the democratic world. Since Trump, we have adopted it as our desperate incantation to ward off Trumpism. But is it wishful thinking?

Is America really exceptional? Yes, but not completely.

This post is about the unexceptional bit. The next post will offer some comfort.

The city on the hill

Given America’s unique economic, military, and media might, we pay way more attention to its politics than to other countries’. (The collapse of Germany’s government in the same week as the US election went largely unremarked outside Germany.1) Though America is not the paragon of democratic virtue it claimed to be, neither is it the only democratic dumpster fire.

The New York Times saw Trump’s win as part of a global trend,

“‘(Voters) weren’t saying, ‘Inflation is tough, but at least I have a job thanks to Biden.’ They were saying, ‘Of course I have a job, but now I have to deal with all this inflation thanks to Biden.’…
The same dynamic is haunting leaders all over the world. Over the past few years, voters have thrown out incumbents, on the left and the right, in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Argentina, Italy and Australia. The top political parties in South Africa, Japan and India also faced disappointing elections. Canada’s and Germany’s incumbents are in danger of losing their jobs next year.”

And, in her November 6 Letters from an American post, Heather Cox Richardson acknowledged, that “both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat”. They aren’t only in America.

But what about Cox Richardson’s deeper explanation?

But my own conclusion is that both of those things were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler…
X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged.

The shill on the hill

Trump rode to power on a coalition of the credulous underinformed and the implacably misinformed corralled for him by the callously self-interested. But misinformation has always been grist in democratic politics’ mill. The great benefit of democracy is not that voters choose wisely. It’s that they choose bloodlessly (comparatively).

The “amplification” is what is new. More precisely, the drowning out of competing voices.

As I argued in The 3Vs of ideas,

“People began complaining about drinking information from a fire hose. But the real change (in the Ideas Era) is that the technology that gave us the fire hose also gave us our own adjustable news nozzles.
Horizontal information is both individualized and globalized so it can be distributed widely, unevenly, and unfiltered by accountable authorities and geography. Under true mass communication the power of the individual – whether alone or en masse in a market– waxes and the power of conventional filters like place and authorities – be they political, managerial, or social – wanes.
The gatekeepers don’t matter when the walls are down.
It has always been easier to sell fantasy than explain reality but now that individuals can broadcast and narrow receive, accountable authorities – institutions, political leaders, managers, media, and even brands – have lost their preeminence.”

We are all underinformed, misinformed, and self-interested to a greater degree than we like to admit, and we have always relied on “influencers”. However, when the vector of ideas was vertical, there were far fewer of them. True they were corporate media giants dominated by that most odious of subspecies, white males, but they were publicly accountable institutions at least in that they were long-lived and never forgot that they could be confronted about what they’d published. So they were careful about it.

They aggregated information for people and political parties aggregated issues for people. Since there were relatively few media and parties, there was, if not always a common set of facts, at least a common arena for the gladiators to contest them.

Today the horizontal vector of information allows social media’s infinite monkeys to aggregate misinformation for people in order to aggregate people for issues. And to do so with little risk of challenge. Donald Trump was able to stage a hostile take-over of the Republican Party because its grandees were no match for the “fire hose of lies” he unleashed.

Social media are obviously part of the political world. They perform the same function as political parties, connecting people and issues. (Albeit from opposite ends. Political parties aggregate issues for people while social media aggregate people for issues.)

Elon, Run Your Business Like a Government

Given Trump’s remarkable facility for lying, in America misinformation is overwhelmingly an instrument of the Right, but the Ideas Era is not unique to America and misinformation is ambidextrous. All democracies are prone to having multiple mutually exclusive polities, each with their own knowledge structures. America is just the biggest prize.

The election was a binary contest, so it is easy to see it as combat between two camps, more heavily armed and belligerent than in the past perhaps, but the same two camps as always. Instead, each misinformation merchant creates their own polity, each built on its exclusive “knowledge”. The polities engage in a haphazard square dance swirling around the floor, continuously coupling and uncoupling.

Horizontal information has no centre. As, I predict, Mr. Trump will soon find. The Russian bots aren’t working to support him, but to undermine the West. He is - in the parlance of the nation that gave us Tolstoy - “a useful idiot”.

A rough beast, his hour come again

On the morning of November 6, a Facebook friend of mine quoted the first stanza of William Butler Yeats’, “The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

With President-Elect in mind, it’s worth quoting the whole poem,

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?2

Now what?

Non-Americans cannot afford to be smug. (Authoritarians in other nations certainly aren’t.) The effects of horizontal information are everywhere. But – and perhaps this is just whistling past the graveyard – there are aspects of the US Constitution and political system that make it more vulnerable to misinformation in the Ideas Era than parliamentary democracies. That’s in Trumped Part 2A Now is the time for all voyeurs...