All the way
Whoa
I’m on the highway to hell
The forbidden truth that threatens democracy in America and the world
I’m a spectator, observing the crumbling foundations of American democratic traditions that underpin the foundations and resilience of democracy globally.
We could think of democracy as an experiment, albeit one that emerged from the lab around 2500 years ago.
In the year 507 B.C., the Athenian leader Cleisthenes introduced a system of political reforms that he called demokratia, or “rule by the people” (from demos, “the people,” and kratos, or “power”). It was the first known democracy in the world.
Cleisthenes “rule by the people” ideal is seriously threatened in the 21st century.
As the 20th century closed out, the tried-and-proven democratic traditions were feeling like an ever more distant echo.
It’s why the American 2020 Presidential elections take on a significance far beyond the choice of a preferred leader. We are called to carefully consider our vote, not only to stay afloat but also to somehow find a way to thrive within the cracks of a fractured and crumbling system.
Forces with powers exceeding the influence of mere mortals are coalescing even as they appear to hold differing agendas and goals.
I think we’re all aware of how opinions can be influenced by flexing the power of multimedia. Recent examples include some fairly important issues like voting in national elections and controversial issues like Britain leaving the European Union.
Media generally has influenced the citizenry for hundreds of years. Editorials, advertorials, and plain old Ads, published by the daily newspapers have been leveraged to posit political perspectives.
That long-established ability for media to influence has morphed into an ability to precisely manipulate with an astonishing level of predictability. It follows then for companies that can confidently promise, and then deliver predictability, they have become the wealthiest corporate entities in human history.
Access to that level of granular certainty can be surprisingly cheap if all you want is for 100 people in a specific geography to see a relevant Ad. We all tend to accept the reality of the world that is presented online, specifically personalized to each of us, on our many screens.
Modern representative democracies in which people decide on policy initiatives directly have citizens who vote for representatives to create and enact laws on their behalf. Canada, Australia, The United States, and Britain are all examples of modern-day representative democracies.
But representative democracy is a remarkably blunt instrument. Hundreds of issues are bundled together at every election with the outcome tending to swing on just a few key issues.
The government that’s elected then presumes consent for its entire program and, if it commands a parliamentary majority, for anything else it wants to introduce in its term of office.
By contrast to the adversarial nature of representative democracy, in which politicians try to dominate and vanquish their opponents, deliberative democracy means drawing citizens together to solve problems. It means creating coalitions where we listen respectfully to each other, seek to understand each other’s views, change our minds when necessary, and create the rich, informed culture currently missing from daily life.
For at least several decades we’ve experienced how representative democracies have been perverted to redistribute trillions of dollars from the poor to the rich. This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation.
According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP — enough to more than double median income — enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.
Price and Edwards calculate that the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality had grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans had inequality held constant — $50 trillion that would have built a far larger and more prosperous economy — $50 trillion that would have enabled the vast majority of Americans to enter this pandemic far more healthy, resilient, and financially secure.
As Price and Edwards explain, from 1947 through 1974, real incomes grew close to the rate of per capita economic growth across all income levels. That means that for three decades, those at the bottom and middle of the distribution saw their incomes grow at about the same rate as those at the top. This was the era in which America built the world’s largest and most prosperous middle class, an era in which inequality between income groups steadily shrank (even as shocking inequalities between the sexes and races largely remained). But around 1975, this extraordinary era of broadly shared prosperity came to an end. Since then, the wealthiest Americans, particularly those in the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent, have managed to capture an ever-larger share of our nation’s economic growth — in fact, almost all of it — their real incomes skyrocketing as the vast majority of Americans saw little if any gains.
The next great test of democracy will be in the USA in November 2020 and there’s a range of interests lining up to challenge what we imagine is how the outcome in a representative democracy should be resolved.
We know that the 2016 American election result was orchestrated by bad actors including Russia and News Corp working in cahoots with very smart GOP campaign architects who understood the leverage available through Facebook.
In 2020 Facebook’s power appears relentlessly self-perpetuating. The platform recently revealed a covert operation run by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency to sow division ahead of the presidential election by setting up a network of fake user accounts and websites. This time, though, the Russian agency hired unwitting American freelance journalists to create the content.
There’s a grim circle-of-life quality to this news. Facebook’s unprecedented growth and commandeering of the digital advertising market — alongside Google and others — helped accelerate the collapse of journalism’s marginal business models. This, combined with a sense that citizen-journalists were just as good, led to media consolidation, publications shuttering, and layoffs of journalists and writers everywhere.
Facebook’s news dominance and mercurial distribution algorithms led to a rise of hyperpartisan pages and websites to fill the gaps and capitalize on the platform’s ability to monetize engagement, which in turn led to a glut of viral misinformation and disinformation that Facebook has been unable (or perhaps unwilling) to adequately police.
This free-for-all, and Facebook’s corporate greed and gutter ethics have made Facebook the platform of choice for political manipulation that has fueled the company’s revenue growth.
Those bad actors I referenced are now hiring and exploiting the very freelance journalists displaced by the collapse of the media industry that Facebook facilitated and helped accelerate.
Eventually, sometimes, Facebook might take action to remove the bad actors, assuring democratic countries of its commitment to freedom of speech, and pleading its role as a protector of free and fair elections.
The simple and irrefutable truth is there has never been a platform that enables anyone with sufficient financial resources to literally control a majority of a population, whether that’s a city, county, country, timezone, or the entire world.
2020 could be the year that democracy dies.
Democracy, as we know and love it, is facing some very powerful adversaries. Adversaries that haven’t been apparent since 507 B.C., when the Athenian leader Cleisthenes introduced political reforms that he called demokratia.
In the USA it’s possible that in 2020, democracy will be declared past its use-by-date. That declaration will come from Donald Trump, should he prevail in the November election.
If he’s elected with a clear majority, or if he finds a way to hold onto power in the face of what looks like a mandate for Biden, then our long-cherished democratic institutions may not be revivable.
And if that happens then tyrants the world over will be energized to do whatever they need to, in order to supplant the shaky remnants of democratic institutions.
It turns out that democracies are easy targets for bad-actors. The enabling tech platforms are profit-driven enterprises with seemingly no, or at best, limited morals and ethics.
Anyone who is funded to the tune of millions of dollars can literally win the hearts-and-minds of their target audience, no matter how large and diverse.
Facebook, therefore, becomes the ultimate weapon. There has NEVER EVER been a weapon this potent in human history.
Even Facebook may not be enough to save Trump in November given the starkly awful milestone that was breached this week. When Anthony Fauci predicted in late March that up to 200,000 people could die from COVID-19 in the US, the figure seemed beyond comprehension. At that stage, fewer than 3000 Americans had died from coronavirus and President Donald Trump was speaking optimistically about having the country’s economy “opened up and raring to go” by Easter.
Given America’s particular health system vulnerabilities, any US President is likely to have struggled to contain the pandemic. But the Trump administration has been notoriously inept.
In the meantime, winter is coming. The colder weather will send people back indoors where the virus spreads more easily.
The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation is projecting that 415,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 by the end of the year — a doubling of the national death toll in just three months. The figure seems hard to believe, but then so did the estimate of 200,000 deaths when Fauci first offered it in March.
Trump’s deplorable, autocratic self-interest meant that a sensible and determined focus on getting on top of COVID was never going to happen.
The situation is now poised to be scored as the greatest social and economic disaster in American history.
And after all that, American voters still appear to have an appetite for four more years of Trump.
If Trump is either elected or figures out how to stay in the White House by whatever means necessary, then it could mark the last rights for democracy.
We live in crazy and unpredictable times. The old social mores and moral standards have been cast aside. It’s akin to someone blowing up Disneyland and that’s something too horrible to contemplate.
About the Author:
Greg Twemlow is a Sydney-based Social Enterprise Founder | Startup Mentor | CEO | Writer | Speaker | Host of https://medium.com/consilio
