Disconnection and Democracy

Part 2 of 4

This is the second of a four-part series asking what precisely is going wrong with democracy. This is not necessarily saying that democracy is dying; rather, I am arguing that it is in crisis. These two ideas, oftentimes lumped together, remain inherently different. The former claims that there is a threat to democracy’s existence in some way, whereas the latter argues that it is not performing as it should.

You may well ask what kind of performance should we measure in democracy. It is a fair enough question and one that cannot be answered by social science alone. We may look at the surface of democracies to do a ‘health check’ and upon finding a functional Parliament, free elections, a form of civil society, and an independent judiciary and declare a democracy is healthy. Of course, growing calls argue that democracy is dying from this very measurement. I will leave it to you, the reader, to decide if Trump is another Orban and democracy in the US is hanging by a thread.

But such analysis skips a step. Doing so ignores why democracy came into crisis and what has occurred for us to get here. Talking about Orban and Trump in the same breadth misses this analysis. We end up talking past each other about the results of democratic deficits without excavating the motivating factors for their arrival. In doing so, we come to witness a crisis but with no solution provided.

So, you will now be asking me what is at the underneath of democratic deficits? Is it a liberal arrogance gone awry to which writers such as Patrick Deneen and John Gray have tipped their hat? Is it economic dysfunction combined with growing levels of migration? Or is it simply current dissatisfaction with the legacy political parties? In some ways, as I shall discuss in parts 3 and 4, all of these issues have some relationship to the fraying of democracy. However, this is not what I shall be focusing on today.

Instead, I shall be asking about our lack of connection to one another. As I sit on the train, I see almost everyone looking at their phones, including me! It is something I also bear witness to in my classes where students struggle to peel themselves away from their screens for more than minutes at a time. Far from interacting with one another, be that arguing or agreeing, I see a solemn sight where young people deny themselves contact with one another, preferring their screen instead.

This is not simply a ‘young person’ problem, as older citizens struggle to connect. Almost all of us, regardless of age, are now attached at the hip to our phones. They organise our lives, affecting the deepest parts of ourselves. Inherently, this changes the way we perform politics. Politics fundamentally is not simply about ideology but about acting out our visions of society. This is perhaps why the notion of technocracy has never really got off the ground. It is simply too boring!

Of course, there are benefits for this despite what Jonathan Haidt argues. The increased connection and greater access to information were supposed to drive a revolution, and in a way, it has. Our communication patterns have changed forever. Whereas penpals and lovers could only communicate via letter writing, which took days or weeks to arrive, now we can send a message, a photo, a meme, or a video at our leisure. It is truly universal with wifi even found in the jungle in Borneo (I managed to find a signal somehow). Borders are now no barrier to friendship and connection.

But it is not the revolution we thought. We are far from the deluge of quality books coming out for free, thoughtful chatrooms, and meaningful relationships emerging from the web that we initially believed the internet would consist of when it first arrived. Instead, perhaps rather predictably, we have created shorter and sweeter alternatives. Instead of free long books, TikTok rules the roost. The chatroom with a 40 page thread on cinema critiques has largely been replaced by angry people bitching at each other on social media and meaningful relationships are now replaced by the morose spectre of swiping left on Tinder.

The appearance of mass media and the 24-hour news cycle has left us open to deluges of information we cannot possibly process. Far from granting us the informational tools to unlock newfound wisdom, it has led to little more than the abundance of false information misguiding us. From vaccines to the war in Ukraine, we live in a weird new age where little can be trusted without extensive verification. Of course, such verification is slower than the output of new information, leading to an inability to truly trust our news sources.

The true danger lies not simply in a lack of trust in long-held institutions but in the merging of entertainment with information. Entertainment relaxes and subdues us, but it does not necessarily make us excellent critical thinkers. The fusion of news and entertainment which has occurred in our era ensures a glossing over of the more difficult questions. The first principle questions are erased, and we begin to lose track of precisely who we are.

“Kids are much more subject to this idea of “When the thinking gets hard, I start looking for entertainment.” I mean, I do this myself. When I’m trying to write something and it’s hard, I say, “What’s the weather? Let me go look at the weather. What’s in my e-mail?” I’m looking for anything that’s more interesting and easier than the thing I’m trying to do” (Jonathan Hadit in the New Yorker)

The tools of connection may be at our fingertips, but the crisis of loneliness has reached epidemic proportions. For those relying upon COVID as the sole explanor, this ignores the inconvenient fact that social capital was on the decline long before the pandemic. However, I do not deny the devastating impact COVID-19 has had on our societal norms, especially for members of the younger generation. But to lay this only at the door of the pandemic ignores more rooted failures.

In many ways, this predates the arrival of technology too, expressing a deeper malaise at the heart of society which emphasises a lack of substance beyond the act of voting to sustain our democracy. Even when I was growing up in the 1990’s mass membership of political parties was a thing of the past, social clubs were on the decline, and religious attendance had fallen through the floor. My era was the era of mass consumerism, where almost unlimited credit unlocked the glass ceiling, opening up a new floor of social poverty.

Not only are we ever more distant from one another, but society is also suffering from a crisis of selfishness. Our online experiences have consumerised social relations in ways never experienced before. Our social reach affects our cache beyond high school and into ‘mature’ years. Moving beyond mere atomisation, although this is an issue as previously discussed, our online connections have changed us as people. Our new communities are bigger, more heterogeneous, and just as unforgiving as they always were.

We may no longer solely preach the importance of material abundance (although it is always bubbling in the background of our politics), but we prioritise social abundance. Our politics is shaped by such notions of virality, with Trump being the perfect exemplar. There is no point in looking to the past- this is something brand new.

(A quote from an anti-vaxer parent)

Voters claim that they want politicians who offer the best solutions regardless of ideology, but this is a false dichotomy. What the best solution is depends upon our ideological stance. Yet, what happens when we live in a post-ideological age? It is not solid solutions people necessarily want but popularity. At first, this appears to be a tautology, but upon deeper inspection, it is not.

The lack of a collective feeling inhibits the ability of democracy to truly function. If we simply move towards the shiny, funny, and invective aspects of our politics, then we cannot make true judgments. Instead, we simply sway in the flotsam and jetsam of our ever more sophisticated information tools. Popularity becomes a legitimacy itself, beyond any deeper values we may seek.

Democracy requires a polity to function. In times past, this may have consisted of relatively small homogenous communities. Defined by common identity and traditions, polities were tight-knit units gravitating towards a purpose. Encouraged by philosophising, public debate, fierce competition and ritualistic sacrifice, such democracies shaped our modern world, and many still hark back to their mythology to try and find something in democracy today.

We may try and find value in such places precisely because it appears on the surface that their politics were clearer than our own. The popular, bland, and myopic statement that ‘the personal is political’ ignores that politics can only exist via channelling communal action. By defining politics by ‘the personal’, we inadvertently ignore the collective roots required for us not only to conceive of politics but to act it out.

As Hannah Arendt argued, power is rooted in collective action. The Chomskian and Foucauldian notions of manufacturing consent and acquiring power limit agency and ability to change the system inside itself. Arendt’s ideal gives us a guide outside of this narrow framework where we remain trapped. Simply blaming capital or mutual coercion is too easy an answer.

But for Arendt’s ideal to come to pass, we do need to find collective empowerment. Totalitarianism for Arendt is defined by atomisation so strong that we cannot conceive of a collective, let alone exist as one. Although we do not live in totalitarian societies today, we do suffer from a lack of collective action and thought. It used to be said that what unites us is stronger than what divides us, but what is it that unites us today?

In our individualistic society and economy, communal action has been difficult to cultivate. Newspapers are dying, political parties struggle for members, and social media anger is ubiquitous. Far from being a community, we are all individually howling into the void, blaming each other for our rather poor state of affairs. Even long form magazines are being encouraged to slim down and cater to the ‘mass market’ rather than questioning the way public taste has shifted.

Despite polarization being labelled as the problem of our time, this is a misunderstanding of the issue at hand. Polarization, i.e., how heatedly we disagree with each other, is not inherently a problem in politics. Certainly, in modern constitutional democracies, polarization has rarely bubbled up to the point of genuine danger to our lives. The guardrails enacted by our forefathers, both structural and social, have generally remained, albeit somewhat tested. The problem is not the heat of politics but what we are disagreeing over.

The world has moved on since antiquity in every way imaginable. Far from existing as city communities, we now exist as democracies on a national level even when we do not have that much in common. The constant discussion over the ‘south vs north’ divide in the UK is not merely economic but a deeper cultural malaise reflecting genuine differences over what we want and how we want it done. The hodgepodge attempt of de-centralising our democracy via councils and regional mayors was the sticking plaster that has failed to solve this gaping wound.

We retain the sacral elements with religious institutions and traditions permeating the air, yet there are few true believers amongst us. We talk of ‘rights’ as if they leapt into our lap and are now undoable. As we are witnessing in parts of the world, this is not the case. Our collective astonishment at such acts fails to apease my concern at what is coming around the corner.

Currently, we are stuck in a crevice between the old and the new, where little appears to work or make sense. This is no one person’s nor political ideology’s fault. It is not the left, nor the right, nor socialism or capitalism. It is the combination of time, the evolution of society and technology as well as our collective lethargy and buying into dynamics we don’t truly understand which is to blame here.

This type of easy thinking is replicated in us blaming Trump or ‘the Left’ for the failures of today. It is too easy to point to the ‘left’s’ inward thinking about identity to understand our crisis. Sakar’s argument isn’t incorrect, but it is five years too late and ultimately derivative. Worse still, Sakar is a perfect exemplor of why democracy is struggling. Unable to act out her values, Sakar preaches embracing larger values and solidarity in print, but online represents the kind of politics she claims to hate. Sakar is a useful symbol for a society where politics has gone wrong, both in its shallow lens of analysis and our collective failure to act out our own values on a deeper level.

“There has been a tendency to spend too much time ruminating on our own feelings” (Sakar in the Guardian explaining her argument)

(Sakar in real life)

It is certainly not the reason why we face the crises that we do. Of course, feelings about identity will spring up in a society which focuses on individual progression at all costs. Sakar mistakes the formation of the modern left for the genuine background conditions providing the breeding ground for our current crisis. We see this in evidence of the right, who are also using group identity as a method for individual self-advancement, which Sakar has predictably pounced upon.

But without sufficiently analysing the problems of virality, social dislocation, institutional, and philosophical failure, we cannot get to the root of the problem. Critiquing the Left’s obsession with identity is no different from Snyder’s discourse on Trump and authoritarianism. It analyses the surface, not what is occurring below, to get at the real failure of democracy in our time.