The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion by Zac Gershberg & Sean Illing

Author:Zac Gershberg & Sean Illing [Gershberg, Zac & Illing, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: POL065000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Process / Media & Internet, POL000000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / General, POL007000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Democracy, SOC052000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies
ISBN: 9780226681702
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Death of Liberal Democracy

Have We Got Fake(d) News for You

We could hardly see it happening in real time. Reality shifted beneath our feet. This was supposed to be the information age, with various new media providing a coherent, stable understanding of the world. Facts were instantaneously accessible. First we could click on a television remote for twenty-four-hour cable news, then we could click on a desktop mouse to run a search through algorithmic engines, and now we can swipe our smartphone screens wherever and whenever we want. Such advances in communications technologies promised to fulfill the Greek theory of doxa, ensuring that common knowledge could be established for more accountability and responsiveness between accurate public opinions and governments. What we got instead was the paradox of global para-doxa, a crisis characterized by alternative facts, fragmentation, and misinformation. Identity supplanted information as news has become curated, consumed, and enjoyed as a function of personal political preference. Faced with the tattered remains of a liberal-democratic cultural environment of communication that no longer exists, we find ourselves experiencing a collective failure in that we’re inhabiting a serious case of denial—insisting that reality can be factually mediated in good faith. We need to acknowledge that what transpired over the past few decades has been the slow then sudden death of liberal democracy as a cultural historical period. New media arose, bad politics descended.

The universal ideals of liberalism were grounded in fairness and neutrality, featuring an impartial legal system devoted to right and wrong; objective journalism, which could inform public opinion with facts; a multicultural emphasis on tolerance and cosmopolitan ethics; rationally minded consumers and citizens; and a series of political norms respected by Right and Left alike. But as new media styles, technologies, and structural pressures opened up a networked world of instantaneous participatory communication, exploitative appeals to identity and power overwhelmed democratic societies. Only the most naked forms of mediated partisanship, it turns out, can cut through the morass of “communication abundance” we have at our disposal.1 What we have experienced, then, is a return to democracy as such. It marks one of the crueler tricks the paradox has ever leveled. Liberal democracy put on a happy face and believed in progress. It was no match for a swarm of angry trolls seeking to win at all costs and yelling in us-them tones. We erred in fantastical thinking, assuming the contradictions between communication and politics had been solved once and for all. Yet here we are, basking in the chaotic glory of a new sophistic age characterized by communicative abundance and base appeals to identity and power.

Our collective blindness was understandable. The proliferation of more and more media, from cable and satellite television’s twenty-four-hour news to the internet and smartphone-driven social networking, provided a legitimate reason for thinking that democracy could be protected from its worst impulses through the freedom of communication. But liberal democracy’s ability to manage information through an elite gatekeeping class that constrained political passions could only last so long in such an environment.

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