The decline of democracy
One of the bloggers that should have more followers than he has is Don Shaughnessy. Don mostly writes about personal finance topics but also about other things and you should definitely subscribe to his blog. In one of his recent posts, he made a statement that hit me like a sledgehammer:
“Many people are too absorbed in their ‘team thinking.’ They have become both ignorant and arrogant. A devastating combination.”
This is one of the worst outcomes of the modern media landscape. My post on Friday about the impact of entertainment media triggered quite a few responses from readers and I wanted to thank all of them for reaching out to me. Their emails, together with Don’s post triggered a few more thoughts on the subject.
As many readers of Friday’s post have pointed out, the idea of bread and circuses is not new and the elites have always used entertainment to keep the “plebs” under control. But what is different today is that the elites no longer control the media (I can hear your protestations already…). Instead, we have witnessed a “democratization” of the media in the sense that its contents are today driven bottom-up rather than top-down. What I mean by that is that, traditionally, all forms of entertainment, from the circuses in ancient Rome to the programming of cable TV was driven by an editorial process. Media czars like Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, William Randolph Hurst in the US or Rupert Murdoch in Australia, the UK and the US could exercise control over the entertainment that the masses would enjoy. Of course, they listened to public opinion insofar as they wanted to run successful businesses, but they shaped public discourse both with what they covered and what they didn’t.
Today, there is no more editorial function. Every fringe opinion can be amplified and reach thousands, if not millions of people through the help of Facebook, Youtube and other social media platforms. The BBC radio programme “Trending” recently had a show about Flat Earthers. This conspiracy theory has gained a massive following over the last decade or so, thanks to the algorithms of Youtube that funnelled conspiracy-minded people towards videos on that subject.
Similarly, in their book “Network Propaganda” the authors Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts describe how in the right-wing media ecosystem there seems to be a hierarchical system. Stories and rumours start on fringe sites, get popularized by Breitbart News and The Daily Caller and finally canonized by Fox News. Unlike in the past, Fox News no longer sets the agenda but has to jump on the bandwagon of grassroots movements popularized through the internet.
And the current US President is a product of this reversal of influence. During the Republican primaries in 2015 and 2016, Fox News was highly critical of Donald Trump because Roger Aisles (and presumably Rupert Murdoch) did not want to see him in the White House. Only as it became virtually inevitable that Trump would become the Republican nominee for President did Fox News change its editorial stance and became one of his biggest cheerleaders. In a sense, Trump became the Republican nominee for President despite Fox News, not because of it – something that would have been unimaginable as recently as the Bush years.
In essence the entertainment industry and the media industry both have reached the final stage of “democratization” that Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote about almost 100 years ago in his book “The Revolt of the Masses”: a decline of societal elites and their replacement by the masses. Writing in 1923, he describes how the increasing democratization of society leads to the rise of fascism on the right and communism on the left, a trend that was already well underway during his time and that would eventually lead to the Second World War.
And if the analysis of political polarization by the Pew Research Centre is anything to go by, we are repeating the same process of increasing polarization today. In my view, this development is directly the result of the public becoming at the same time more ignorant and arrogant, as Don put it. We become more ignorant, because we increasingly consume information that confirms our prior held beliefs. We become more arrogant because we engage less and less with people of different opinions. As a result, we not only become more tribal, but also less willing and able to compromise and accommodate people who differ from us in their race, income, religion or political views. And in a democracy, it is this inability to engage with people of different opinions and form compromises that leads to the decline first of the political discourse and then of society overall. It is this combination of ignorance and arrogance that drives the public debate about Donald Trump in the US, about Brexit in the UK, about migrants in Europe and the top 1% around the globe etc.
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame any one side. I think both sides are at fault here. Everyone lives in their own little echo chamber, which is why I am so adamant that we all should de-bias our media consumption. And we all should talk more with each other, if possible in person, but email and the phone will have to do if you live far away. Personal interaction with people of differing views than yours is what keeps a society healthy and a democracy alive. So, if you want to do something positive for society today, go and talk to someone who you disagree with or someone who has a vastly different background than you. Have an open-minded conversation and try to understand where they come from and what makes them tick. Do not try to convince them that they are wrong. And if you happen to disagree with me on any of my posts and utterances on Twitter, feel free to reach out to me and start a discussion. I love to hear from you. Together, we can make this world a better place, one conversation at a time.
