Watering the seeds of our own destruction

Those lyrics were written in 2008, at the end of the George W. Bush era as Barack Obama headed for the White House. If the song’s sentiments had any currency then (and they did), then it must certainly be the consensus choice for America’s dirge today.

Back then I’d have thought a decline of American dominance wouldn’t be such a bad thing. What had our imperiousness done for us or anybody else lately? There was Vietnam, a spate of South American adventures, insinuation into a handful of civil wars—often on the wrong side—and as for the Middle East, I don't even like to think about it.

Well, sometimes I like to think about it.

Since then though, my view of American hegemony has mellowed. We’re not perfect, but heaven knows we try. Meanwhile, much worse empires have emerged. So Randy Newman’s elegy takes on a certain urgency today.

But is this really the end of the American empire? Almost half the voters voted against Trump, and with passion. Most of the Democrats’ policy positions are supported by most of the public, many by large majorities. And this is no landslide; we have seen much more lopsided elections. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won the electoral vote by 486 to 52. Richard Nixon swept everything except Massachusetts. He cheated, but still. Ronald Reagan won by 489-49. Even Barack Obama scored a bigger electoral victory, at 365-173. None of these elections were harbingers of the end of the American Century.

Still, many are declaring this one unnervingly lopsided, and not without reason. The Democrats lost a lot of states, including the vaunted ‘Blue Wall” in the Rust Belt. Trump outperformed in virtually every geographic, demographic, and ethnic group. Kamala Harris, a Black woman, got fewer votes from women than Joe Biden did in 2020, and fewer Black votes, too. All this after waging a nearly flawless campaign while Trump made every error possible, including insulting the very voters he needed.

But the collapse of American democracy is not unique. French voters struggled to hold off Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (again) in their recent election. Far-right parties have substantial roles in the governments of Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Sweden, Hungary, Croatia and the Czech Republic. Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom has the whip hand in the Netherlands parliament. And Germany! Actual Nazis are demanding an end to teaching about the Holocaust in schools, while Chancellor Olaf Schultz’s Social Democrats are polling in third place behind the far-right Alternative for Germany.

This is not just an American phenomenon. It's Europe, too. There’s something going on, deep in all of these democracies. Suspicion of all institutions. Rejection of reason. Hatred of democracy. It’s not just a threat to American dominance, it’s a threat to the idea that democracy is the pinnacle of political evolution.

It’s worth noting that in almost every historical case, fascism has risen from democracies. The term fascism was coined in Italy, a democratic monarchy reacting to perceived slights by its allies at the end of the Great War. The German version was a reaction to the explosion of political and cultural liberalism after the same war. In Spain, Franco’s fascist movement emerged from the failure of a new democracy that had deposed the monarch.

To paraphrase Karl Marx (and Plato before him), it seems that democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction. It’s not hard to identify what those seeds might be: Sluggishness in the face of rapid change. Whipsawing policy as governments change hands. A tendency for opposition parties to blame the government for everything in their struggle for power, resulting in widespread cynicism toward government altogether. A growing popular suspicion of expertise. And the inevitable hijacking of free speech to upend the pillars of democracy itself.

Timing is everything

All of these can be found in some measure within all democracies, but fascism hasn’t always been on the rise everywhere. The question is not, “Why here?” but rather, “Why now?”

To answer that question, I offer a thought experiment: Imagine our election campaign without Fox News, without Infowars, Joe Rogan, Twitter/X, or Russian bots. Imagine an election conducted without this massive infrastructure of deception, where voters had to make their decisions based on reality, even if that reality could be interpreted in various ways by the opposing campaigns. What if voters understood that inflation was at two percent and that real wages were up? What if voters remembered the state of their lives four years ago, when COVID shut down much of society? And what if these realities were embraced by all the elected representatives in Congress? Imagine all these things, and then ask who would have won the election. The conclusion is clear: Donald Trump is president because of voter mis- and disinformation.

I don’t bring this up simply to rage against the “deplorables” or bellyache about the rotten system. But this conclusion directs us to examine root causes.

The disinformation at the root of Trump’s victory would not have been possible a few decades ago, when the public discourse was mediated by broadcast TV, radio, and newspapers. Moreover, law and FCC regulation prohibited concentration of media in local markets: no entity could own a monopoly of media outlets in the same market area. Until 1985, TV opinion was governed by the “fairness rule,” which required any opinion expressed to be balanced by its antithesis for an equal amount of airtime.

All of these media sources were run by news organizations that included trained journalists and editors whose job was to keep frank inaccuracies out of their product. They had editorial bents, to be sure, especially the newspapers: The Chicago Tribune broadly supported proto-fascist and America First movements during the 1930s, while the New York Post was distinctly left-leaning. And in large cities ethnic papers flourished, in Hebrew or German or Czech or whatever language could find a readership. But in all these cases, editors had to avoid alienating any significant portion of their readership, so they were careful to stick pretty much to reality.

A truth-optional ecosystem

The internet brought us the age of the Democracy of Ideas. Everybody can be an editor, and nobody is under the thumb of the FCC. You don’t need to please a majority of your market because your potential market is the entire world. The most narrowly defined interest can find enough readers or listeners or viewers to sustain itself. And with the development of social media—first Facebook, then the rest—the most extreme ideas, once relegated to the internet’s backwaters, have a permanent drip of adrenaline via the algorithms that drive users to increasingly intense doses of whatever ideology they started with. Any semblance of reality-based consensus is gone.

This new landscape makes it possible for people to believe—or at least to accept as possible—that a Democratic cabal drinks the blood of children, or that Haitian immigrants eat neighborhood pets, or certainly the more mundane lies the Trump campaign peddled with the assistance of their friends in Congress. Without this apparatus, Donald Trump would still be giving the pink slip to make-believe apprentices on TV and Republicans and Democrats would be arguing about the deficit.

The development of new communications media helps explain why the same or similar kind of political movement is appearing around the globe, because internet use has spread worldwide and, for that matter, gives every user worldwide reach. All of which brings to mind a hypothesis: Is it possible that new communications media tend to bring about these sorts of political upheavals? If so, what can we expect in the future?

The once and future role of new media

History offers some enticing evidence. The early 20^th century saw the rise of widespread anti-democratic and autocratic movements—and not only in Italy and Germany. Portugal’s National Union emerged in 1933. Franco Falange Española came to power in 1936. Romania and Austria all had strong fascist elements of government during the same era. In 1934 the Montreux Fascist Conference included representatives of fascist movements from Norway, Greece, Ireland, France, and Lithuania. Members of Britain’s royal family were sympathetic to the German Nazis, and let’s not leave out the German-American Bund and America First Movement in the United States.

Many of these emerged as reactions against democracy and its tendency toward weakness and compromise. But all of them emerged as radio and film use was maturing, offering a new way for emerging movements to gain a hearing among large swaths of the population.

Further back in history, we can point to the European revolutions of 1848 and the realignment of political parties and the Civil War in the U.S. to the rise of mass print communication—newspapers and magazines—made possible in turn by the invention and spread of railroads and the telegraph. Before then, all news was local. There was no immediate access to what was happening in the next county or shire, let alone the nation’s capital or across the globe. But when the train could bring news in a day, and the telegraph could bring it in a minute, ideas could move faster than ever before. Moreover, transportation across borders has become easier and more appealing with the internet’s reach. People can see that other places might be worth emigrating to.

And didn’t Gutenberg’s invention of movable-type printing make the Bible accessible to the masses, resulting in the Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years War?

Now imagine a new media landscape in the 2030s. Extended reality (XR) immerses individuals in a hybrid real and digital experience informed by AI-driven algorithms, creating entirely individualized experiences of the world. AI creates tailored news and media streams populated with deepfakes indistinguishable from reality.

If this seems far-fetched, consider the extent to which it has already been achieved. Only the technology changes.