It is shocking that here in America we have reached the point to ask this kind of question. But the signs are all around us. Bending and corrupting basic democratic rules is actively sought and reaction to it remains muted by those whose party harbors these anti-democratic forces.
Accepting the election results followed by the peaceful transfer of power is supposed to be the defining tradition of US democracy. Though this tradition was preemptively questioned, it did survive the 2016 presidential election. But its reversal was openly attempted after the 2020 election and it is actively pursued in anticipation of the 2024 presidential election.
In another sign of the corrosion of faith in democracy, the Conservative Political Action Conference chose Hungary, an only-in-name democracy, as its venue for this year. So, the message is clear. A significant segment of Americans not only do they want to control the election results as a way to seize power, they also wish to do that in order to impose the type of illiberal democracy that suits their political and personal choices.
So, what accounts for this recent slide toward authoritarian attitudes and actions? Is it the emergence of new political and economic realities that never before tested American resolve to preserve democracy, or an erosion of our inner faith in democracy? Let’s look at some of the proposed explanations held responsible as undermining our commitment to democracy.
One is economic anxiety and displacement caused by the elimination of well-paying jobs and the decay of social and civic life that comes to the affected communities. That, we are told, has generated a strong resentment against the established political order which is held responsible for the abandonment of working class and rural Americans.
Another more invidious reason is what is promoted as the “replacement” fear propagated on broadcast news outlets, like Fox News, and online social and news media. The development of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society has apparently reached the point that makes “old” white Americans unsure of the future of their culture and power sharing. (As an aside, let me say that if there is any group of Americans that were truly replaced these are the indigenous Americans!)
Another fear is that of the presumed loss of religious freedom. Christians, especially, feel that their freedoms are somehow under attack. This, of course, originates from the belief that despite its secular Constitution America is fundamentally a Christian nation. Nothing, therefore, short of aligning the nation’s laws with Christian dogma would satisfy the adherents of this national narrative.
Finally, the last foil for staunch conservatives is the rise of liberal thought and culture. Galvanized by the attention-catching slogans of woke and cancel movements, conservatives have come to believe that liberals are about to capture the nation’s soul and drive it to hell.
The difficulty I have with all these explanations as drivers of the political movement toward authoritarian tendencies and solutions is that they do not describe entirely new experiences in the history of this country.
Americans have suffered economic hardship through the Great Depression and workers have lived under worse conditions when labor regulations, health insurance and unemployment benefits were absent. Nor have Americans been sealed better from the booms and busts of the economy in the past than now. And yet through out those moments of financial hardship, Americans did not lose their faith in democracy.
The replacement or augmentation of the American population with fresh immigrants has been around since the founding of America. Yes, every new wave of immigrants, whether from Christian Europe or other continents, has been viewed suspiciously and met with hostility by the population-in-place. But, again, those generations of earlier Americans did not abandon democracy to protect their own interests. When it came to granting equal rights to Black people, America even paid the price of a civil war to achieve a more inclusive democracy.
Religious freedoms are not less today than in the past. If anything, religious rights have found a receptive ear in the courts all the way to the Supreme Court. This court’s conservative majority guarantees that religious rights will keep expanding even beyond the point the Constitutional separation of church and state permits in the minds of many Americans. Thus, fears concerning religious freedoms is overblown and not consistent with recent experience.
What about the case of liberals? Liberals like any other group engage in the marketplace of ideas no more than the think tanks funded by conservatives. The bias against certain topics of speech and speakers is nothing new in America. Over time content and speakers have been excluded for offending the sensitivities of the right or the left. Besides, liberal thought has done more than conservative thought to expose the plight of working-class Americans as a result of economic inequity and the scant attention to their living conditions.
So, the point I am trying to make is that the above conditions have been around before and yet they did not lead previous generations of Americans to abandon democracy. Therefore, something else must account for the current drive toward anti-democratic means.
Democracy is a governance system that promises to be a win-win arrangement for all participants over the long-run. For this to work, we trust that the rules of expressing our political choices and the transfer of power are fair and durable. For people to lose that faith in democracy, they must truly feel an existential threat so that they no longer consider democracy to be a win-win arrangement.
I cannot think of any more potent force in generating feelings of existential fear other than the influence of social media and the emotionally charged information flowing across the internet. We know that this is behind the rise of teen anxiety and suicides. It is not an implausible leap of reason to argue that this is working the same way among adults when it comes to our emotional reaction to the unrelenting barrage of information on political, social, cultural and economic opinions splashed on the web.
This means that similar experiences generate a greater emotional load because we are given much less space to engage in reasoned reflection as we come under the pressure of emotional stimuli. Which raises the question: “Will democracy survive the public square of the web?” And “What is our personal responsibility?”
Let's Reason 