Democracies don't just fail
They must be actively undermined and it's that process we need to focus on
‘People realised that, on this crowded, hungry continent, democracy was more terrifying than despotism. Everyone yearned for order and a strong government.’
—Liu Cixin, Death’s End (the final book of The Three Body Problem trilogy)
The phrase “crisis of democracy” is regularly invoked in contemporary discussion of politics, but we need to be careful with it. It directs our attention to the effects rather than the causes of the problems that confront us, and it’s that misdirection I want to talk about.1
The truth is you have to work hard to make a democracy fail.
The democratic collapse in the US, for instance, has been set up over decades as various forces have conspired to undermine and demonise every aspect of democratic practice. It has reached the point where a well-known commentator feels that this is a reasonable description of the current mindset amongst a plurality of the US population:
It would be wrong to say that the Trump movement, or modern National Conservatism, represents a wholehearted endorsement of Nazism. But it should be uncontroversial to say that the American Right views wokeness as a greater threat than the potential return of Hitler.
The absolute moral sickness and historical ignorance at the heart of this “uncontroversial” observation didn’t arrive in the current moment fully formed. It needed to be nurtured and grown and normalised over years and years.
In another piece about US democracy, Caleb Crain wonders “whether voters are well informed enough for democracy to succeed” but he at least acknowledges the way in which we-the-people are actively overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available to us. Bad knowledge crowds out good in any society in which expertise is demonised and in which powerful figures will defund public education but commit untold billions to public manipulation.
The point is that on one level there is a failure of knowledge—we can’t deny it—but it is the manufacture of that ignorance that should concern us. It doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is not intrinsic to the citizens of the United States or any other nation, and it doesn’t help to call what is happening a “crisis of democracy”.
Put it this way: One Sunday, when I was about 13, I was having a hit of tennis with a friend on the school courts. Another kid showed up—older, bigger, unknown to us. He got stroppy for some reason and—long story short—he ended up punching me hard in the stomach and knocking the wind out of me. No light would be shed on the situation by describing the pain that ensued as a “crisis of breathing”.
Who’s to bless, who’s to blame?
As the illustration at the head of this post makes clear, fear and misinformation are old tools, and we humans relentlessly fall for the same tricks, no matter how smart we think we are.2 These days, we half-recognise the problem, with endless articles discussing the terrors of polarisation, disinformation and misinformation, but it is amazing how often the “crisis of democracy” is raised as a catchall explanation.
This recent piece in The Saturday Paper by ABC journalist Patricia Karvelis, for instance, conjures the notion of a “crisis in democracy” but the analysis is partial, at least to my way of thinking it is. I had trouble following the pronouns—note the shift in the referent for “We” in the second paragraph—and the argument finally boils down to some claim of social media being bad and mainstream media being our last best hope; that “we” must rebuild trust and audiences need to be more media literate.3
The argument is very top-down, us-and-them, and while it acknowledges that politicians actively seek to divide electorates, it then places a kind of naive hope in the idea that, given the right encouragement—from a tough, mainstream media—that the same people causing the division, the politicians, will also somehow fix it. “It is time,” the author writes, “to double-down on elevating facts and demand of our leaders that they use proportionate and truthful political rhetoric.”
In fact, this mythical version of journalism is every bit as broken as anything happening on social media, and by not acknowledging that fact, articles like this are misdirecting us. If this theory of journalism actually worked, we wouldn’t be in the mess the article itself sets out.4 For heaven’s sake, even now, most mainstream media won’t call fascism fascism or genocide genocide, while constantly lauding the very politicians leading us down the authoritarian path as “strong” and “decisive”.
Apart from anything, the whole idea of treating social and legacy media as distinct entities is suspect. The reality is that they both operate in a hybrid space, interacting with each other and together creating the push-and-pull of what is generally called the attention economy. This hybrid space is altering politics and every other institution and industry of the contemporary world.5
If you want a compelling discussion of trust and the media and a more nuanced analysis of the democratic “crisis”, scroll to the 36:25 mark in this video and listen to analyst Alex Fein. (Note: Apologies, I had the time wrong is an earlier draft and in the newsletter.)
She makes the point that just as there is an economic one per cent—an elite—there is an information elite as well.6 “It's a really small proportion of the population that is engaged in the political process and that engages with this information,” Fein says.
And then she nails the central problem that our democracies are increasingly asked to navigate, the paradox that the availability of more information has, rather than making us better informed, contributed to the fact that many people simply can’t keep up.
“Most people find it too noisy, too overwhelming, too many contested spaces,” Fein says. “They don't know whom to trust, and there has been this mass switch off from news and traditional kind of sources of political information.”
She makes another telling point that most of the “crisis of democracy” people miss, about the nature of the disengagement that is happening.
“I want to make a distinction as well between people being disengaged from the political process and from the journalism and the media around it, versus being disengaged from the political issues. They care about the issues deeply and they often are incredibly sophisticated in the way they conceive of those issues.”7
Further discussion of the same issues is available in this essay by Henry Farrell , which draws on the book by Chris Hayes called The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. “When the attention economy transforms society into a massive thirst trap,” Farrell asks, “what happens to politics?”
Well, we are seeing what happens, but as Farrell goes on to point out, we only have a limited idea of how to respond.
What I’m driving at is that the notion of a “crisis of democracy” is not a neutral diagnosis. It is a contested story advanced by those who benefit from democratic erosion. Authoritarian regimes, financial and tech oligarchs, and other reactionary elites have co-opted legitimate grievances—like wealth inequality, bureaucratic complexity, information overload—to undermine democracies and make authoritarianism seem a viable solution.
They’re doing it on purpose.
Under such circumstances, holding up social media as the problem and legacy media as the solution is misleading at best.
To repeat, all forms of media operate in a hybrid space of attention seeking that overwhelms us. This doesn’t just happen: it is actively pursued by various players seeking different sorts of advantage who are then swept into a maelstrom of algorithmic reproduction that bears down upon the rest of us like a Biblical flood.
Having been critical of Karvelas’s argument, though, I will also note that her underlying point is heading in a useful direction in that she is implicitly suggesting we need to narrow the amount, and sharpen the quality of, the information people receive. Legacy media, at its best, was once a tool for exactly that sort of “gatekeeping”. So was social media at its inception, allowing us to narrow our focus through trusted recommendations from friends and others who had established their bone fides on the platforms. But those days are gone: not accidentally, but because people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg wilfully nuked the systems from which such trust had arisen.
As Farrell says, “We don’t have good ways of thinking about how the attention economy is reshaping society and politics,” and this shortcoming is as true of political scientists as it is of journalists. We are all flailing to a certain extent. And the “crisis of democracy” narrative misdirects us further.
Latch onto the affirmative; don't mess with Mr. In-Between
One of the most insidious tendencies of the crisis narrative is that it hides from us the positive things that are happening, and nowhere is this more obvious than in Australia.8 For various historical and institutional reasons—that I have been documenting for years now—our democracy has remained amazingly resilient, even as key institutions, particularly the major political parties, have become coopted by vested interests, hollowing out as the social basis of their authority has been eroded.9
Our system is far from perfect, but it is frustrating to read stuff like this—from the Introduction to a recent book called How Australian Democracy Works: And why we need it more than ever—that is so oblivious to the reality of contemporary Australian politics:
When I was a child in the mid-1980s, one of my dad’s favourite T-shirts was a beige number with brown piping, and on it was a cartoon of the prime minister, Bob Hawke, with his head poking out of a beer can, his trademark luxuriant hair and glasses shooting ecstatically into the sky. Above him were the words ‘Bob’s a bottler!’ – in other words, a keeper, a champion.
These days, you would be hard-pressed to find ordinary voters decked out in merchandise sporting celebratory images of our current prime minister, Anthony Albanese, or Opposition leader, Peter Dutton. Australians just don’t get that excited about their political leaders anymore. Studies consistently back this up: trust in politics and politicians is low and shows no sign of recovery.
It’s true that no-one is wearing Anthony Albanese t-shirts, but have you noticed the absolute explosion of t-shirt wearing and corflute flying that has been going on for years now amongst other sorts of citizens? Surely there is a positive story to tell here?
Democracies must confront the threats they face, not as existential crises, but as battles in a prolonged struggle for accountability. By disentangling systemic challenges from manufactured dysfunction, we can reaffirm democracy’s capacity for self-correction—a resilience that authoritarians and members of the status quo fear.
It is almost—almost—unbelievable to see former Labor Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, calling for a pre-election alliance between Labor and the LNP so as to whiteant any chance the crossbench might have of being meaningful involved in any minority government that happened to emerge.
And if this sort of overt, anti-democratic, authoritarian-adjacent BS isn’t bad enough, it is also telling to see—as the independent member of Goldstein in Melbourne noted the other day—the extent to which the campaign against the independents is being conducted on the basis of attack and smear.
This sort of behaviour ⬆️ is not a crisis of democracy. It is an example of key players in the democratic process actively looking to undermine, by any means possible, a democratic renewal that has grown organically in local communities and that has been growing, slowly but surely, over decades.
As political economist Ben Spies-Butcher has suggested, what is happening goes way beyond the fragmentation that “crisis of democracy” types point to and is potentially heading towards something much more positive. “[O]ver time, successful [independents and minor party] candidates have relied less on localism and defection and more on sustained organisation. These forms of organisation reflect distinct partisan differences and suggest a potential shift from forms of fragmentation towards realignment.”
Realignment is not a crisis. Well, it is for the major parties, and it is extraordinary how often any challenge to them is presented, not as a positive enhancement of community engagement, but rather as something like a “credible threat” to the status quo. In other words, as a crisis of democracy.
Let me make a final point about how all this happens.
There is a huge institutional and political-class bias against most forms of collective achievement. Nearly all our systems of mainstream explanation default to the elevation of the individual leader or the adoration of the alleged lone genius. The whole political class has a saviour complex. The media—social and legacy—is much more focussed on the outstanding individual, the “strong and decisive” leader than the effective team; on a clash of personalities rather than the quotidian workings of systems put in place to manage things behind the scenes.
(Matthew Lamb offers a fantastic discussion of this point in this post.)
Part of the reason the community independents movement went unreported in the legacy media for so long was precisely because of its dispersed, nebulous nature. It’s lack of traditional leadership and party form was so discombobulating that journalists had to invent the idea of “the teals” and cast Simon Holmes à Court as their mysterious leader. It is a complete fantasy, but it illustrates perfectly how, within legacy media, there is a concerted missing of the forest for the trees because journalism is all about the trees.
Anyway, here we are
Most of what we call the “crisis of democracy” is a misdirection engineered by vested interests who actively seek to coopt the institutions of the state to their own ends and use crisis talk as a veil for their sabotage. They have been incredibly successful, and as developments in the US show, we are now entering an endgame.
Yes, better civics education and media literacy would help, but these things alone will not solve our problems. The challenge lies not in democracy’s inherent flaws but in recognising and resisting the organised campaigns that exploit its openness to subvert it from within. Have another look at the screenshot above from Zoe Daniels and think about what is happening.
In the end, the only thing that can challenge the potency of the well-funded campaigns of division and misinformation that cause our democracy to rot from the inside—the campaigns manufactured to advance the vested interests of the few—is the ability for ordinary voters to get together amongst themselves and talk to each and build trust from the ground up. When that happens, community leaders emerge from below—they are not imposed from above, by parties and the like—and therein lies the key to keeping our democracy viable.10
There are reasons to be optimistic.
The truth is, strong party affiliation is often associated with a willingness to undermine democratic norms, or ignore bad political behaviour, as long as it benefits the party that people support. As Simone Weil has said, “Once the growth of the party becomes a criterion of goodness, it follows inevitably that the party will exert a collective pressure upon people’s minds. This pressure is very real; it is openly displayed; it is professed and proclaimed. It should horrify us, but we are already too much accustomed to it.”11
Given this, we can read the undeniable trend of Australians moving away from strong party affiliation as a sign that people are aware, on some level, of how parties are helping to undermine democracy and we should take great heart from the fact that they are trying to find alternatives.12
The “crisis” is not in democracy itself but in the fact that our democracy has been coopted by forces with little interest in a system of government that is properly by and for the people.
The next election is still wide open, but whatever the final result, it will just be a part of an ongoing process of change, one step forward, two steps back; just a jump to the left and a step to the right. The only near certainty is that electing another a majority Labor or LNP government is not going to fix any of the major problems that confront us. The concentration of political decision making in a moribund two-party system is the proximate cause of every political problem that currently ails us, so why would we vote that?
As such, this post is another stage in gradually unpack our understanding of contemporary Australian politics, repeating some things we have already talked about, but hopefully, deepening the overall analysis. To support this ongoing project, consider becoming a paid subscriber and access the full archive.
History is full of elites telling us why democracy can’t or shouldn’t work, as academic John Keane reminds us, speaking of the 1920s and 1930s. “Intellectuals were among [democrcy’s] gravediggers; they helped swing the prevailing mood in Europe towards fatalism, the belief that all signs pointed towards the replacement of parliamentary democracy by a yet-to-be-defined alternative. Especially from the mid-1920s, many writers, thinkers, journalists indulged talk of ‘the crisis of democracy’, and weird things were said.”
He lists a series of quotes from everyone from author Robert Musil to journalists at The Times of London, all of them shrugging democracy into unworkability, and HG Wells can stand as typical. He “told Oxford summer-school students that the coming age of collectivism demanded ‘enlightened Nazis’ willing to match the spirited courage of continental fascists.” (And btw, we can add the Liu Cixin quote I used at the head the story to the list of those imagining democracy into failure.)
Democracy is always fighting for legitimacy against elites and intellectuals who have no problem in misdirecting us by locating the problem in the lower classes: thus the constant reference for the need for better civics’ education or media literacy and the like. In Australia, we are often directed to the racism of, say, Western Sydney, when in fact, even a cursory look at the voting record will show that, until recently at least, what kept John Howard and his divisive race-based policies in power were the well-educated votes of those in the leafy suburbs. They just needed Howard’s elites to absorb and repackage Hanson’s racism for them in order to overcome their own classism.
While I’m at it, it is worth mentioning that journalist Margo Kingston figured all this out thirty years ago, when Pauline Hanson first rose to prominence (and the mainstream never forgave Kingston for her insights). She recognised that the elites had abandoned the rest of the population and that Hansonism was a symptom of that top-down contempt (without in anyway endorsing the worst of the Hanson project):
Surely it was the duty of the elites to solve the causes of Hansonism, because Hanson was only the symptom, not the disease. After all the anger and pain of Hansonism, that was the lesson I felt I'd learned from her campaign. Pauline's People felt they no longer understood their society and what it was for, and many of them felt they were being told they no longer belonged to it. They couldn't make head or tail of the political discourse, and no one could explain it to them or even wanted to, let alone help them join the brave new world their elites insisted was inevitable.
Kingston quotes Canadian author John Ralston Saul’s view that “There is no reason to believe that large parts of any population wish to reject learning or those who are learned. People want the best for society and themselves. The extent to which a populace falls back on superstition or violence can be traced to the ignorance in which their elites have managed to keep them, the ill-treatment they have suffered and the despair into which a combination of ignorance and suffering have driven them.”
The article is, in fact, an extract from Age of Doubt: Building Trust in a World of Misinformation, edited by Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang, which will be out soon.
The legacy media, too, actively pursues conflict in order to generate eyeballs, clicks, whatever and they are in no place to lecture the rest of us about the need for civic education. The way in which everything from climate change to ethnic cleansing in Gaza has been reported shows institutions completely in thrall to particular biases that are rarely acknowledged, partly because they are so ingrained as to be invisible to the practitioners themselves. But sometimes they are only too well aware, as the #robodebt debacle shows, and certain media organisations were themselves complicit in the demonisation of disadvantaged citizens, actively playing the role of hitman for the government of the day.
We might even point to the line-up for this week’s episode of Q&A, which sets up two politicians against two non-experts who could, at best, be described as provocateurs.
How does this sort of programming “reinvigorate trust in the democratic system”?
Including, say, music (and this Bob Lefsetz piece is a nice discussion of that if you are interested).
I’m inclined, based on other readings, such as Sally Young’s work, to put the size of this information elite at somewhere around 15-20 percent of the voting public. It’s worth further discussion but I’ll save that for later.
The sort of slanging match a show like Q&A often degenerates into—because the choice of guests almost guarantees that degeneration—is not honouring the deep care for issues that Fein’s research suggests is present amongst regular voters. So surely such programming is contributing to the informational overload that is at the heart of the problems with the attention economy in the first place. Do we really need to even consider what Joe Hildebrand thinks about Matt Kean’s approach to climate change?
Maybe it is more obvious to me because I am Australian.
The archive is full of this sort of analyisi but maybe start here:
This is also a call for the reinvigoration of the union movement.
From Simone Weil’s book/pamphlet, On The Abolition Of All Political Parties.
Would the attention economy work to Trump's and his wannabes' advantage if more people's bullshit meters hadn't been affected by years of whiteanting by Murdoch and marshmallow media luminaries like Patricia Karvelas? Add to that the lack lustre impact of blancmange politicians like Anthony Albanese and the venal cruel and corrupt sanctimonious Scott Morrison plus Labor's own whiteanting from the Rudd Gillard Rudd fiasco followed by Abbott with his determination to whiteant the ABC and we have an ABC that wouldn't say boo to a goose and a mainstream media that it is pathetic in its clickbait mentality. It is no wonder that those paying attention to politics and the misnamed crisis of democracy, is a small percentage of the Australian voting population.
Last time there was real enthusiasm was Kevin 07. Not sure there was a Bob Hawke type tee shirt though.
As our US Ambassador he is effectively muzzled about making the comments he used to make about Murdoch and Trump. Maybe Albanese should have chosen Malcolm Turnbull instead.
The Greens have lost out on much of a share of the attention economy except as the whipping boy for the duopoly and Murdoch. They have felt and acted stale for some time except for Max Chandler Mather who really walks his talk. What he pays for out of his own pocket to support his electorate is phenomenal.
Actually, Trump has done us all a massive favour. The Neoliberal experiment is finally shown up for the crock of shit that it truly is. That democracy only works if you elect ethical people. Morrison ought to have been enough to open up everyone's eyes on that one.
Sort of on topic but sort of not, Musk is going to be Trump's undoing is my prediction. Using the White House to sell Swasticars! I imagine David Rowe, Cathy Wilcox et all, will have a field day with that one.
You're too kind to Pats Karvelas. She is the epitome of what's wrong with the media now - she's got the right pronouns, is in the US phraseology a 'liberal elite', is probably horrified by what News Corp produces, yet leads us to exactly the same place as those cretins.