Opinion: Democracy is inherently messy

A New York Times opinion piece makes some interesting assertions about the nature of democracy:

We may think that these clashes over the Mar-a-Lago search and over the state of our democracy are an aberration, a Trump thing. But they are actually the latest example — increased in intensity by the internet — of something that has been a permanent part of our politics, what we call the paradox of democracy.

Far more than a bundle of laws, norms and institutions, democracy is an open culture of communication that affords people the right to think, speak and act and allows every possible means of persuasion. That makes every democratic society uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of communication. We may not like it, but something like Jan. 6 is always potentially in the offing.

We ought to avoid the naïveté of liberal fantasy, which imagines we can impose reliable guardrails against dangerous or deceptive speech. Indeed, there’s a whole genre of articles and books arguing that social media is destroying democracy. Because of changes to online platforms around a decade ago, wrote Jonathan Haidt recently, “People could spread rumors and half-truths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogeneous tribes.”

But this is precisely what an unwieldy democratic culture looks like. Depending on the communications environment, a democracy can foster reliable, respectful norms, or it can devolve into outrageous propaganda, widespread cynicism and vitriolic partisanship.

And when communications devolve into propaganda and partisanship, a democracy can either end with breathtaking speed, as it did in Myanmar last year, when the military overthrew the democratically elected government, or descend more gradually into chaos and authoritarianism, as Russia did under Vladimir Putin.

Nothing forbids voters in a democracy to support an authoritarian or vote itself out of existence (as the ancient Athenian assembly famously did). The history of democracy is full of demagogues exploiting the openness of democratic cultures to turn people against the very system on which their freedom depends. In France, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte leveraged a celebrity name to run for president on a campaign of restoring order in 1848, only to end the Second Republic with a self-coup to become emperor when his term was up.

According to one poll, only 21 percent of Republicans think the investigations into Mr. Trump should continue. However they arrived at that opinion, that they hold it at all matters. It gives conservatives not just the political cover to subvert the rule of law but also the power to create their own alternative reality.

Since Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020, Republicans have embraced the “big lie” and tried to restructure state laws to control future elections. You could say this is a brazen attack on democracy itself, but it’s really a glimpse of democracy shorn of liberal restraints.

It would be much better, of course, if democratic politics yielded to the preferences of measurable public opinion and reflected the will of the people. It would be better still if we were guaranteed protection by our civic and legal institutions, binding the rule of law to society with accountability and fairness.

“Yet the truth is,” as the political communication scholar Zizi Papacharissi has written, “we have always lived in imperfect democracies, and we still do. Democracy is not static. It is not a given, it is not guaranteed, and it is not stable.”

Qs: Would it be much better if (1) democratic politics yielded to the preferences of measurable public opinion and reflected the will of the people, and/or (2) we were guaranteed protection of democracy by our civic and legal institutions, binding the rule of law to society with accountability and fairness?

Is it a liberal fantasy that imagines we can impose reliable guardrails against dangerous or deceptive speech, or do some conservatives also want to limit free speech, particularly free speech that is critical of what conservatives want or that conveys inconvenient facts, truths and/or sound reasoning?