The Greatest Threat to Democracy Is a Feature of Democracy
Damon Winter/The New York Times
It’s been over a month since Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was searched by the F.B.I.
by Sean Illing and Zac Gershberg
The response to that event from political actors across the ideological spectrum has been predictable — and an example, for better or worse, of what democracy looks like in action.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently warned of “riots in the streets” if Mr. Trump should face prosecution for mishandling classified information. Naturally, the former president glommed on to that and similar narratives and has amplified them on Truth Social, his Twitter-like social media platform.
Meanwhile, President Biden, in a speech warning that the Constitution, American values and the rule of law are under siege, said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”
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.
Our American democracy has lurched in cycles from dissatisfaction to crisis to progress. Citizens have the opportunity to speak out and decide for themselves, and events unfold across the country; it could be a referendum that preserves abortion access in Kansas or a primary defeat for Liz Cheney in Wyoming or a protest movement inspired by a video of the extrajudicial killing of a Black man in Minneapolis or a fanatic attacking an F.B.I. office in Cincinnati after engaging online message boards.
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.”
Too many people assume that liberalism and democracy are one and the same. They believe that certain norms, like respect for minority rights and the rule of law, are wired into the political system when, in fact, they are just conventions that matter only to the extent that citizens care about them. If nothing else, the past six years are a reminder that democracy is a contest — and there are no inevitable outcomes or assurances that all sides will play by the rules.
The paradox at the heart of this debate — the idea that democracy contains the ingredients for its own destruction — tells us that free expression and its sometimes troubling consequences are a feature, not a bug. What sometimes changes are novel forms of media, which come along and clear democratic space for all manner of persuasion. Patterns of bias and distortion and propaganda accompany each evolution.