One of the things that has been on my mind a lot, over the last years, has been what it would be like to believe the allegations that the Our Only President and his Party have been making. Or, in some way, what it would be like if it were My Party and a leader I trusted who were making such allegations, and who had themselves been accused of similar sorts of crimes.
I have talked about this before—it’s one of the few aspects of our political situation that I have written about over these last years. The allegation that high-ranking federal law-enforcement officials used the national security apparatus to attempt to sway the Presidential election and destroy the careers of the duly-elected President's associates. The allegation of millions of fraudulent votes in the 2016 election, which made it appear as though the President had lost the popular vote. The allegation of a rigged primary, in both 2016 and 2020. And now the allegation that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen; that there is obvious evidence of widespread fraud that the states and courts have refused to even look at; that even Republican state officials are refusing to enforce the law.
If a person were to believe all of that—and I have to emphasize that the alternative explanation is that their Party leaders are corrupt and lawless villains whose every word is a lie and who have again and again put the national interest, national security and the very future of the nation at risk for their own personal benefit—then such a person cannot also believe that they are living in a functional democracy. What does such a person have to lose by an autocratic takeover? How would a coup by those leaders who agree with me on policy preferences and priorities be worse than keeping the forms of democracy without the heart of it?
What if it were my Party?
Now, to be fair: there is no-one in my Party that I could not be persuaded is a corrupt and lawless villain whose every word is a lie. If Nancy Pelosi told me something preposterous and self-serving, I would be very willing to believe she is lying. Who would that not be true of? Joe Biden? Barack Obama? Bernie Sanders? If any one of them were accused of some sort of villainy, would it shake my worldview? Not really. I mean, I would be disappointed and angry, and I’d probably defensively demand some significant evidence, but then I’d probably shrug and move on. If a recording turned up of Joe Biden threatening some State official with jail time unless he threw the election, I’m pretty sure that would be plenty for me.
It might be different, though, if it were the whole Party leadership. I don’t know how I would respond if it was the whole national leadership had been corrupt and lawless for years. I like to think, of course, that I would be one of the people who believed the bulk of the evidence rather than continuing to follow, but presumably that’s what everybody thinks, and in the event, that’s not everybody. I can’t be easy to accept that the people you’ve been supporting are corrupt and lawless villains, and that you were duped.
So here’s where we are today. I don’t know how to convince half the country that they have been duped, not just by Trump but by the entire leadership of the Party that doesn’t actively reject their policy preferences. And if they don’t accept that the entire leadership of their Party is corrupt—if instead they believe that the entire mechanism of the electoral process in many states as well as much of the federal national security and law-enforcement bureaucracy are corrupt—then I don’t know why they would participate in the sham of self-government that is the other explanation for the last several years.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
For me, a significant factor would be the various third-party validators of any given set of facts: newspapers that had been historically trustworthy, NGOs that make an attempt to be non-partisan, etc. The current issue is not merely that the members of the other party don’t seem to believe that their leadership is corrupt, but also that they have been convinced that there isn’t any such thing as objective validation of fact. And sure, I guess if literally all of the institutions of the nation are corrupted, it’s plausible that this also includes the news media and NGOs… but wouldn’t there have been a transition period where some NYT reporters spoke against the corruption of their colleagues and editors (and then were silenced) or something like that?
Yeah, having multiple sources of news and analysis, including the Grauniad overseas, gives me some confidence that I’m not being duped, or at least that if I am being duped that the conspiracy is so wide-spread that I can’t fight it anymore.
Thanks,
-V.
What do people want, and how do we get there?
Do people want trustworthy sources of information? How do we build and support and verify those sources? (A current problem is that many people have reduced “trustworthy source of information” to “source of information that tells me what I already believe or suspect or want to hear”.)
Do people want all of us to share the same sources of information so we can live in a shared reality? How do we reach agreement on which sources those might be? (This seems impossible if many people don’t prioritize a shared reality over their own mental or emotional comfort.)
Do people want a democracy of some form that is insulated from autocracy and corruption and allows full and equal participation? How do we set up that sort of system, install checks and balances, prevent autocracy and punish corruption?
I don’t think we have that sort of democracy, we don’t have a clear path toward that sort of democracy, and we may not have a critical mass of our society wants that sort of democracy. So for those of us who do want that, is it a case of “build it and they will come”? Or do we first have to persuade more people to want that sort of democracy? Is our current broken democracy a step in the right direction that incrementalism can sufficiently improve?
Very thoughtful questions that I need to think about more.
As a quick response, I would suggest that “what do people want?” with respect to form of government can’t readily be separated from economic and cultural forms of that question. Access to information is similarly part of a larger issue of access to resources. We definitely need shared, equitable access to resources in addition to shared access to information if we are to live in a shared reality.
The question re incremental change might be posed as–can incremental change effectively reduce inequality? Even as various forms of cultural egalitarianism have advanced over the last half century, economic inequality has been growing much worse and continues to do so. Economic inequality funds the media system that weaponizes racism and cultural differences against democracy.
Economic inequality often seems like an insurmountable problem, but Heather Cox Richardson tells us to take heart from the defeat of the robber barons a century ago. I’d like less economic inequality, and I used to assume that most people agreed with me on that and simply disagreed on how to get there. Now I suspect that in the almost 10 years since Occupy started, the needle has shifted from almost nobody wanting to tackle economic inequality to baby steps being included on the fringes of the conversation. We’re still far more willing to consider supports at the bottom end than we are to do anything at all about the top end.
I agree that these are important questions.
I don’t want to overstate the extent to which Americans have ever wanted a democracy that allows full and equal participation, at least in the sense that they care more about that than about their policy priorities, or even in the sense that they want other people to really be able to participate as fully as they do. I think most Americans during my lifetime have probably thought that they ought to want that, even when the other people aren’t much like them, and I think that more people are comfortable explicitly rejecting the full participation of other people than was true in, say, the 1990s. But that has always varied, on time and circumstance and just how “other” the other people were considered to be.
That doesn’t help me toward any sort of answer to your question of how we get there. It’s just an acknowledgment that despite my implication in the post, this is not the first time that we’ve had a serious crisis of democracy, and just as we have somehow managed to muddle along in the past, it’s possible that we will muddle out of this one, too, without really reviving American love for the principle of democracy.
Or, you know, we might not muddle out of it. Just because we’ve been lucky fairly often in the past doesn’t mean that we will keep it up.
Thanks,
-V.
There’s a third piece to put into the mix along with participation in democracy (which in our representative democracy means participating in the electoral process) and policy priorities. That is participation in representative democratic governance, in which I would guess only a small percentage of U.S. citizens participate, and fewer understand well. Some people experience forms of democratic governance through participation in civic organizations, unions, or the workplace. As I look at myself, I see my life as largely organized through participatory structures of self-governance in which I am actively involved. I am active in local governance as a citizen, I am active in a self-governing religious community, and my workplace is very significantly run by participatory, nominally elective structures. I have this life partly because I value participatory self-governance very highly, but partly by good fortune that many of my fellow citizens don’t enjoy. I would guess that most workplaces are not nearly as self-governing as small colleges, most religious organizations are not as self-governing as Friends Meetings, and few people have the experience of semi-regularly attending the meetings of the local city/county councils, boards of commissioners, and advisory commissions.
Democratic self-governance is hard work, and it takes time, considerable skill, and no little good will and trust for it to function with something close to optimal effectiveness. But for all its shortcomings, it’s categorically superior to authoritarian governance. But if people don’t experience it–if their workplace lacks participatory self-governance, if their religious community lacks participatory self-governance, if their family life lacks it, if their schooling has lacked it, and if they don’t experience local democratic participatory governance at work, then their sense of what democracy means is mainly elections, which are not in themselves pleasant experiences, and may appear–in contrast to the rest of what a person observes in their lives–a very peculiar, inefficient and disruptive way to determine who is going to be the boss.
I think that once people really feel that they are participants in governing their own lives, their commitment to democracy increases significantly. Far too few U.S. citizens have such a sense. The growing turn-out in elections is, I think, a promising sign that the people are recognizing that government is important and that they do have a say, but for our democracy to flourish (or even to survive), we need ways to enable people to participate much more actively in democratic governance as well as democratic elections. Practice, I would suggest, is the way that commitment to principle grows stronger.
I entirely agree—Jon Bernstein refers to voting as the training wheels of democracy. The bulk of participation is beyond that, whether in formal governmental bodies or in complaining at the coffee shop with your buddies. And as I keep saying here, the purpose of democracy is to create a people capable of self-governance, in all the various aspects of life.
Thanks,
-V.
I was looking at The Tyranny of the Pandemic Office, by Megan Evershed, and it reminded me of your observation. She doesn’t make the connection between the tyranny of the workplace and the deterioration of the public space, but she quotes Elizabeth Anderson as saying that workplaces “impose a far more minute, exacting, and sweeping regulation of employees than democratic states do in any domain outside of prisons and the military.” It’s hard to see how we can create a people capable of democratic self-governance if most of people’s lives are in anti-democratic spaces.
Thanks,
-V.