Defenders of Reality (and the Republic)

I am reading a new book “The People vs. Democracy” in which Yascha Mounk argues that Liberal Democracy is decomposing into illiberal democracy and undemocratic liberalism. After reading the introduction, I can't tell which of these governmental bastards scares me more, thought I want to focus on undemocratic liberalism and semantic contagion for a few minutes.

We all know by now that money means power. We see it with regulatory capture, with all of the problems of Cindy Whitehead, Farm Bill’s, and lord knows Google and the rest of Big Tech. These are some of the forces at work in our democracy. Government, with its alphabet soup of agencies that are connected to what Jefferson called “popular sovereignty” are increasingly unresponsive to the people. Can anyone name the SEC director? I sure can't. The European Union is the pinnacle of this kind of technocratic rule, and the people of Greece are rightfully pissed about it when their pensions are unilaterally cut to pay back investors who want some kind of return on the sovereign greek debt they bought. This kind of governance, where no one is really oppressed for illiberal reasons, scares the shit out of me.

Okay, back to semantic contagion. I am persuaded by Carl Elliott and co. that ideas spread when you give them voice. I think “incel” culture is a good example of this process, where ideas gain legitimation just by being articulated and brought into the public sphere. I present Exhibit A: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opinion/incels-sex-robots-redistribution.html. Problematic ideas have never found it easier to gain traction, using twitter trolls, bots, reddit, and the pages of the paper of record to advance their (often) toxic ideas. It feels like the Overton window has never been more flighty, or prone to the whims of a few hundred thousand retweets. This kind of epistemology, where Emerson Spartz is finally toppled by someone equally brilliant at capturing out attention, but with ideas much more vile than listicles and the rest of the nonsense we see on the internet, also scares the shit out of me.

So where do they come together? It doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility to me that the powers that be will see a need to curtail ideas at the fringe, and that people who have the fringe ideas will see a need to challenge the authority of the powers that be. Liberal and undemocratic bureaucracies seem to be on a collision course with democratic (in the very literal sense) and illiberal forces of the internet. I am not sure who might prevail, but I know that liberal democracy will be caught in the middle.

So here we are, caught in a vice of semantic contagion, and the power of moneyed interests. What is a common person who believes in reality, but has an inkling for all the ways people seek to manipulate us, to do? In short, we need to resist both, and resist urges from both sides to throw in with the technocrats or the trolls. Neither cause is fully just, and it is only through patient, inconvenient, contant learning, questioning, and public action that we can loose the vice and reclaim some civic identity and cohesion. My biggest takeaway from Science and Culture is that this is hard. It takes work. It takes learning to be comfortable with the grey in the middle, and tension between powerful ideas. It takes being willing to be wrong. It takes vulnerability and compassion, but also implacable determination to not be deceived. I believe in reality, but the reality I believe in takes constant, active work and interpretation to make it one worth living in. So let's all saddle up: the republic, our fellow citizens, and reality itself demand it.