Democracy faces the paradox of being threatened by the ideal of freedom

It’s been more than a month since Mar-a-Lago, the home of Donald Trump, was searched by the FBI. The reaction to this event by political actors from all sectors of the political spectrum has been predictable and is an example, for better or worse, of what democracy looks like in action.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently warned of the risk of “street insurrections” if Trump is brought to justice for mishandling classified information. Naturally, the former president took this narrative and others like it and 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 attack, said Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans [sigla para Make America Great Again, slogan da campanha de Trump] represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic”.

We might think that these disagreements about the Mar-a-Lago magazine and about the state of our democracy constitute an aberration, a Trumpian thing. But in reality they are the latest example of something that has been a constant element of our politics, something we call the paradox of democracy, whose intensity has been heightened by the internet.

Much more than a package of laws, norms and institutions, democracy is a culture of open communication that guarantees people the right to think, speak and act and allows all possible means of persuasion. This makes every democratic society uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of communication. We may not like it, but something like January 6, 2021 is always a possibility, something that has the potential to happen.

We must avoid the naivety of liberal fantasy, which imagines that we can put up credible barriers against dangerous or misleading speech. In fact, there is a whole genre of articles and books arguing that social media is destroying democracy. Jonathan Haidt recently wrote that, due to changes in online platforms about ten years ago, “people were able to spread rumors and half-truths more easily and to group themselves more easily into homogeneous tribes.”

It so happens that this is precisely the face of a complex democratic culture that is clumsy to handle. Depending on the communications environment, a democracy can foster credible and respectful norms, or it can descend into demeaning political propaganda, widespread cynicism and hostile sectarianism.

And when communications devolve into political propaganda and sectarianism, a democracy can either end with unbelievable speed, as happened in Myanmar last year, when the military toppled the democratically elected government, or it can deteriorate further into chaos and authoritarianism, as did the Russia under Vladimir Putin.

In a democracy, nothing prevents voters from voting for an authoritarian one or voting for their own ends (as the Athenian Assembly did in ancient Greece). The history of democracy is full of demagogues who exploited the openness of democratic cultures to induce people to turn against the very system on which their freedom depends. In France, in 1848, Napoleon Bonaparte took advantage of his famous name to run for president on the platform of restoring order, only to end the Second Republic with a self-coup and become emperor when his presidential term came to an end.

Our American democracy has been tripping in cycles, from dissatisfaction to crisis to progress. Citizens are given the opportunity to express themselves and decide on their own, and events unfold across the country. It could be a referendum that preserves access to abortion in Kansas, a Liz Cheney primary defeat in Wyoming, a protest movement inspired by a video of the extrajudicial execution of a black man in Minneapolis, or a fanatic attacking an FBI office in Cincinnati after participating in online forums.

According to an opinion poll, only 21% of Republicans think Trump investigations should continue. However they arrived at this opinion, the simple fact that they hold it matters. This gives conservatives not only a political argument to subvert the rule of law, but also the power to create their own alternate reality.

Since Trump’s 2020 defeat, Republicans have embraced the so-called “big lie” and scrambled to restructure state laws so they can control future elections. We could say that this constitutes a blatant attack on democracy itself, but in reality it is a glimpse of a democracy devoid of liberal restrictions.

Of course, it would be much better if democratic politicians yielded to the preferences of measurable public opinion and reflected the will of the people. It would be even better if our civic and legal institutions guaranteed us protection, linking the rule of law to society with accountability and in a fair way.

“But the truth,” as political communication scholar Zizi Papacharissi wrote, “is that we have always lived in imperfect democracies, and we still are. Democracy is not static. It is not given, it is not guaranteed and it is not stable.”

Too many people assume that liberalism and democracy are the same thing. They believe that certain norms, such as respect for the rights of minorities and the rule of law, are intrinsic elements of the political system, when in reality they are nothing more than conventions that matter only insofar as citizens care about them. The last six years have shown us, at the very least, that democracy is a contest — and that there are no inevitable outcomes or guarantees that all parties will play by the rules.

The paradox at the heart of this discussion – the idea that democracy contains the ingredients of its own destruction – tells us that free expression and its sometimes disturbing consequences are an intrinsic feature, not a bug. What sometimes changes are new forms of media that arrive and open up democratic space for all kinds of persuasion. Patterns of bias, distortion and propaganda accompany each evolution.

Film and radio produced the artistic environment of a dynamic culture in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, but in the following decade the concentration of these media in Nazi hands under the direction of the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, paved the way for world war and genocide. At the same time that television brought the public closer to its leaders, the logic of this media rewarded the artifices of political figures as disparate as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Each time new forms of media emerged, people inevitably used them for different purposes: to reinforce a flourishing democratic society or to destroy it.

For more than a century, knowledge has been generated and mediated by elite institutions, especially major newspapers and major national television networks, which anchored a discourse guided by norms. But the deluge of social media in the 21st century has overturned that arrangement and it has been used as a tool to weaken our democracy from within. This is inevitable.

To strengthen liberal democracy, leaders will need to uphold the rule of law, even if that means risking negative political backlash from devout Trumpists. The committee’s January 6 hearings were not in vain: they created a forensic record of an intentional effort to subvert a peaceful transfer of power. In addition, they may have generated a good audience on television, leaving more citizens informed about what really happened. But that’s not enough. In the end, the only way to tackle a seditious conspiracy is to prosecute the criminals and defeat the people who support them at the polls.

If it means criminally indicting Trump if there is sufficient evidence that he kept classified documents at his beach club and lied about it, or if it means preventing him from running for public office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment constitutional, whatever.

The good news is that our system has proved resilient: Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election were rebuffed on January 6, 2021. It’s a victory for American democracy.

But, like every democratic victory, this one was provisional. Whenever there is democracy, there will be demagoguery. And the opportunity to put the brakes on power remains just that: an opportunity.

If our institutions don’t defend themselves, perhaps they deserve to fail. And if their advocates can’t persuade enough people to support them, that’s likely to happen.