Has social media created conditions in which liberal democracy can't survive?

Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic (Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid -11th April 2022 - [£]) is very good on the whole issue of social media making democracy more stupid and unsustainable, and more to the point, it's a good all-purpose post on the impact of social media on Representative Democracy.

"In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?"

And... 

"It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust. An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side." 

And...

"The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group. The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death."

For me, one of the interesting points is the question of 'why are people stupid, all of a sudden?'

I'd argue that we are all quite stupid most of the time, but social media has made it evident, aggregated it, and created conditions which (as I predicted back in 2004) were damaging to Representative Democracy - the only real success story of the democratic west. Many of the authoritarian currents on the crude-populist left can be explained by a political school of thought that had a priesthood, of sorts, and one that understood which paths (e.g., identity) had dragons waiting on them. That priesthood has now been overwhelmed by low-stakes day-trippers - the political hobbyists.

Democracy as a Guiding Star - Max Shachtman

 Here (via Democratiya) is Max Schachtman on "Democracy as a Guiding Star" [pdf] - which includes one perfect heading: 

"Democracy as the road to socialism, socialism as the fulfillment of democracy"

‘The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas,’

 A free-to-read post from conservative blogger Ed West reviewing Paul Johnson's 'Intellectuals' - a take-down of Rousseau, Marx, Bertrand Russell, Sartre and Kenneth Tynan, among many others.

How the fear of being duped makes you an anxious sucker

 A good, free to read post over on Aeon on the fear of being a sucker, and the way that this fear often provides people with an easy alternative to a more useful understanding of power relations. I'm going to give this post a new tag - 'victimhood' - a real vulnerability that is exploited by crude populists.

Understanding vanguardism.

 

A very useful post on Bob from Brockley (from 2013) - understanding Leninism and 'vanguardism':

"The principle of the vanguard party came from Lenin's conviction (based on the thought of his two intellectual mentors, George Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky) that the "the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness," and not able to develop true class consciousness by itself. Thus - whereas Marx argued that the working class could only be emancipated by its own hand and that "communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties because] they have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat" - Lenin saw a need for a vanguard to bring class consciousness to the workers. This means, inevitably, that an enormous investment is made in the truth of the party's positions: only the party is able to pierce the veil of illusion under which the rest of us labour.

And the principle of democratic centralism (fully formulated by the Bolsheviks in 1905, with an increasing emphasis on the "centralism" bit rather than the "democratic" bit only later) is that a party can come to a decision democratically but once it does it must carry it out without dissent.

These principles were passed into the hands of the megalomaniac psychopaths who have flourished in the movement since Lenin's death. Both principles are used to enforce absolute obedience to the party leadership, and to stifle all criticism. Criticism, however trivial, undermines the party's claim on truth, exposing that it lacks the true consciousness the workers expect of it."

Bob goes on to think through the way that the far-left is so easily captured by psychopaths. 

Left authoritarianism

According to Sally Satel, the experts somehow overlooked authoritarians to the left (The Atlantic, September 25th 2021) [£]  - quoting a study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Carl Schmidt and Political Romanticism

Via Roger - from the introduction to this translation of 'Political Romanticism' [pdf] - you can read more about it here. I have been reminded that Schmidt - who eventually became an unrepentant Nazi - is not an unproblematic writer. Still, this passage rings a few bells....

[click on the image for a clearer read]