Juliet Samuel
The West must reinvent democracy for a new age
One year ago, an “impossible” thing happened: Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. His election, on the back of promises to build a wall and dismantle the West’s major geopolitical institutions, was greeted with hysteria and prophesies of doom. A year later, his administration is mired in scandal, unable even to staff its departments, and it looks like much ado about nothing.
Don’t assume, however, that normal service will resume in a few years. Yesterday, thousands marched through London wearing Guy Fawkes masks to protest against voting, against capitalism, against government. The marchers think they are cool and alternative. But they also have much in common with the older, reactionary voters who brought Mr Trump to power. Both groups have lost faith in the institutions, conventions and values of Western liberal democracy.
It seems fitting that, with the political tectonic plates shifting, Westminster is mired in a bizarre sex scandal. It reached a new level of insanity yesterday with the news that an adult minister might have looked at legal porn on his own computer and must now be “investigated”. The pall of sleaze hangs over everything, so that we can no longer separate serious from trivial, fact from fiction.
This trend that has been on the march for decades, if not centuries. Between the world wars, Walter Benjamin, a German critic, documented the extraordinary emergence of mass culture: shopping malls, advertisements, city amusements and popular literature. Writing had, he observed, been “pitilessly dragged out onto the street” and, for the first time, plastered on billboards and glossy magazines.
Reading and writing, from their invention in Phoenicia, were the preserve of kings and priests. Half a millennium ago, the printing press and the Reformation brought the realisation that biblical text and knowledge are for everyone. Learning spread to a class of mandarins and intellectuals until, in Benjamin’s time, it blasted out of libraries and parlours into the consciousness of the masses.
Benjamin thought this reinvention of literacy would liberate the world. The masses had finally thrown off the shackles of awe and ignorance and would not be told how to live by priests and kings. He was right that a revolution was coming. But instead of liberation, it brought the Nazis.
Consider what Adolf Hitler offered voters. He promised identity, strength and order. This wasn’t just about hyper-inflation and reparations. It drew also from the erosion of village, family and traditional, religious life, and the resulting experience of meaninglessness, nihilism, and yearning for a sense of belonging.
The point of this is not to suggest, fatuously, that Mr Trump is a new Hitler. Rather, it’s to understand that we are experiencing the continuation of a technological trend that, badly handled, presents an existential threat to democracy. We are now living not in an age of learning, but information. The dismemberment of text from its authoritative context has continued at breakneck speed. Instead of reading books or journals, we browse fragments of thought and news online. Newspapers, doctors, spin doctors, politicians: Google and Facebook have given us ways to second-guess or cut out all of them. The new medium has shattered knowledge into pieces – bytes, gifs and status updates. This is liberating, yes, but also overwhelming and dangerous.
Russia’s interference in Western elections shows how dangerous. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Mr Trump won just because of Moscow. But it is becoming clear that foreign powers, who wish ill on us, can target our populations with subversive messages on a mass scale.
Misinformation or “fake news” has rarely spread so fast or found such a hungry audience. It’s helped by the way in which we browse, rather than absorb, information, picking up loose impressions that feed “narratives” over facts. As Moscow understood, it isn’t necessary to convince voters of an alternative argument. All that’s needed is to erode faith in the idea of truth. If no one knows what to believe, they stop trying. Cynicism and nihilism are the result.
We are cutting loose from the Enlightenment ideas of truth and scientific reason. The loss of religion, family and the erosion of the nation have left us adrift. The world has never seemed so meaningless. Perspectives and “theories of thought” have replaced facts as arbiters of righteousness. “Fake news” is the application of this academic phenomenon on a mass scale.
In the West, political institutions have struggled to cope. Their first response, after World War Two, was technocratic. The idea was to enshrine values, like rule of law, human rights and capitalism, in international institutions. This might work for Germany, but in the Anglo-saxon world, through Brexit and Mr Trump’s election, voters have declared that they want a new approach.
What that should be we don’t yet know. The answer, I am sure, is evolution rather than revolution, but it certainly isn’t to ignore the message. Voters feel deeply the loss of meaning brought by technology and want to slow down. Most don’t want to abolish the nation, embrace whirlwind demographic change or surrender all economic security and continuity. Of course, there’s a limit to how much governments can slow change and applying blunt instruments to do so will fail. But if political elites override voters, by stopping Brexit or forcing out Mr Trump, for example, they will only foster extremism.
Mr Trump is about to embark on a tour of Asia, where he will visit China, the world’s rising power. If you want an example of how an authoritarian regime responds to technological change, China is exhibit A. Beijing is using the information age to track and control citizens’ every move. The rise of a middle class isn’t tending towards democracy, but totalitarianism.
The task of the West, especially the Anglo-saxon world, is to reinvent democracy for a new age. It’s about developing a sense of belonging as well as freedom, fostering mass political participation without mob rule, encouraging free speech alongside respect, harnessing our newfound diversity to further an exchange of ideas rather than shut down debate. The responsibility for this is on all of us – parents, neighbours, citizens, politicians, employers, workers, teachers, thinkers and so on. And if, in the end, we fail, or choose revolution over reform, the failure will be ours. It will be no good blaming Russia.