Authoritarianism, Propaganda, and the Public Sphere: What is the Future of Democracy?
Democracy as we know it is dying. Virtually everywhere, authoritarianism is on the rise. It appears the global order that we have always known has been turned on its head. Today, Rocky would not beat Drago. With the internal rise of nationalism and authoritarianism, Rocky could not even beat himself. The United States has become so politically polarized, with endless distrust on both sides of the aisle, that there is no longer room for compromise or deliberation. Why are the ideals upon which the United States and the West have prided themselves now crumbling? Reports from Freedom House, opinions from speechwriter Ben Rhodes, and Jürgen Habermas’ idea that legitimate political deliberation must happen in a public sphere, as well as Yochai Benkler, Robert Farris, and Hal Roberts’ theory that propaganda has essentially eliminated this public sphere, all point to propaganda and manipulation being the culprits.
In a 2006 article entitled “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research,” Jürgen Habermas explores ideas of mass media and its effects on democracy. He states that “for the deliberative model, the legitimation process must pass through a public sphere that has the capacity to foster public opinions.” In addition, he explains:
“The deliberative paradigm offers as its main empirical point of reference a democratic process, which is supposed to generate legitimacy through a procedure opinion and will formation that grants (a) publicity and transparency for the deliberative process, (b) inclusion and equal opportunity for participation, and (c) a justified presumption for reasonable outcomes.” [Habermas]
Habermas describes the public sphere as “rooted in networks of wild flows of messages—news, reports, commentaries, talks, scenes and images, shows and movies with an informative, polemical, educational, or entertaining component.” The public sphere is where all conversation and information flows take place. The deliberative model cannot function without a healthy public sphere. This requires an independent, self-regulating media system that links political conversation with active participation in civil society and a civil society that empowers active political participation. It must not “degenerate into a colonizing model of communication.” Has it not already? Because of this system, society has become too polarized to foster debate. There is no healthy, cohesive public sphere. There is no independent self-regulating media system. Although networks like Fox, CNN, and MSNBC are technically independent firms, the outlets on both sides of the political spectrum have become too clouded by money interests and ratings to foster informed political conversation to appeal to larger and increasingly extreme audiences. These financial interests have revoked the independence of the mass media.
For the deliberative model to work, there must be a societal belief in the democratic process, and enough trust on both sides of the aisle for there to be formative, constructive conversation about political happenings. In their 2018 book Network Propaganda, Yochai Benkler, Robert Farris, and Hal Roberts explore the negative impacts of propaganda on modern democracies, and how it has broken the trust required for democratic function. They define propaganda as “manipulating and misleading people intentionally to achieve political ends” and as “the manufacturing of consent.” If democracy relies on the consent of the governed, if it can be manufactured through media messaging, can the democracy any longer be considered legitimate? The authors coined the term—the book’s namesake—network propaganda, describing it as follows: “the ways in which the architecture of a media ecosystem makes it more or less susceptible to disseminating […] manipulations and lies.” Network propaganda is reinforced through two cycles, (1) the feedback loop, as well as the (2) pipeline and the attention backbone.
The feedback loop happens when an unverified claim of a politician is picked up by the media, and then is claimed as reliable by a politician for having been picked up by the media. For example, when President Trump and his allies made claims that Dominion Voting Systems were fraudulent, Fox News repeatedly reported these claims. In turn, the same politicians stated that since Fox News was reporting it, their claims now had credibility. Smaller news outlets then started to pick up the story until it snowballed into something much larger than the original claims, in this case, a lawsuit reaching a $787 million settlement for Fox News to pay Dominion Voting Systems for libel.[14]
The pipeline and the attention backbone is what occurs when smaller news outlets report fringe stories, getting attention from their smaller audiences, which eventually go viral and reach the national news cycles. They then disseminate into a larger audience. [Benkler et. al.]
Last, and perhaps the most harmful to democracy, is using propaganda to disorient. The purpose of disorientation is not to persuade audiences in any particular direction on any particular issue, but to make it impossible for them to know what is and what is not the truth.[15] This creates a lack of epistemic trust. No one is sure what—or whom—to believe. The authors provide the example of Rush Limbaugh, American neo-conservative. His attacks on the trustworthiness of “government, academia, science, and the media seemed designed to disorient his audience and unmoor them from the core institutionalized mechanisms for defining truth in modernity.”[16] Society has come to the point where the truth seems to have become relative: the truth now seems as if it is only what one chooses to believe.
Since the global financial crisis in 2007-8, there has been a consistent decline in global freedom and democracy. Autocratic regimes are prevailing. According to a 2022 report on authoritarianism from Freedom House, an independent American watchdog organization focused on global freedom, 60 countries saw a decline in freedoms, while only 25 saw an increase. Thirty-eight percent of the world’s population live in Not Free countries, and only twenty percent are living in Free countries. The authors describe this trend as follows:
“Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same. In countries with long-standing democracies, internal forces have exploited the shortcomings in their systems, distorting national politics to promote hatred, violence, and unbridled power. […] The global order is at a tipping point, and if the democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian rule will prevail.” [Repucci]
The idea that democracy is the only way for sovereign nations to be successful, secure, and prosperous is dying as autocratic regimes are becoming more and more viable. Additionally, the report states that democracies are being harmed from within by “illiberal forces, including unscrupulous politicians willing to corrupt and shatter the very institutions that brought them to power.” They highlight the insurrection on January 6, 2021, where rioters stormed the Capitol Building in an organized effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The insurrection illustrates the unwillingness of Trump Republicans to participate in the peaceful transition of leaders, and the disregard for the institutions that gave them power in the first place. These events implicate the United States as being harmed by illiberal forces, unscrupulous politicians, and corruption all illustrated in Freedom House.
Democracy is more than the rule of the majority. It stipulates that the rule of law must be obeyed, institutions must be held accountable, civil rights and liberties must be respected, the government must sway to the general will, and people must consent to be governed. The democracy in the United States is continuing to fall below its original standards and these democratic criteria. Trump and his Republican associates were hardly held accountable for their role in the events on January 6; Congress continues to staunchly vote to keep gun laws as loose as possible, even if the majority of Americans believe they should be stricter; the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade no matter how many Americans begged for the right to choose to be codified. These are the most basic standards of democracy which are now being disregarded in a vulgar display of power.
These mechanisms of network propaganda—disorientation, the feedback loop, the attention backbone—all work toward weakening our democracy and degrading the health of our social relations. The lack of epistemic trust is what caused the insurrection of January 6. It led to false reporting to mass audiences and an inability to foster conversation with the other side of the aisle. If deliberative democracy is on its way out, where do we go from here? Do we fight tooth-and-nail for our democratic commitments, or do we succumb to autocratic rule?
Bibliography
Bauder, David, Randall Chase, and Geoff Mulvihill. Associated Press. PBS NewsHour. “Fox, Dominion Voting Systems Reach $787 Million Settlement over False Election Claims,” April 18, 2023. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fox-dominion-voting-systems-reach-settlement-over-false-election-claims.
Benkler, Yochai, Robert Farris, and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda. Oxford University Press EBooks. Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190923624.001.0001.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research.” Communication Theory 16, no. 4 (November 1, 2006): 411–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00280.x.
McFaul, Michael and Ben Rhodes. FSI. “Understanding the Global Rise of Authoritarianism,” World Class. Podcast audio. November 8, 2021. https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/understanding-global-rise-authoritarianism.
Repucci, Sarah, and Amy Slipowitz. Freedom House. “The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule.” Freedom House, n.d. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2022/global-expansion-authoritarian-rule.
