From Brexit to the US election, 2016 saw a march towards universal distrust
Francis Fukuyama says the creeping belief in open societies that everything is rigged or politicised attacks our trust in institutions. Without trust, democracy itself won’t survive
The emergence of the internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s was greeted as a moment of liberation and a great boon for democracy worldwide. Information constitutes a form of power, and to the extent that information was becoming cheaper and more accessible, democratic publics would be able to participate in domains from which they had been hitherto excluded.
The development of social media in the early 2000s appeared to accelerate this trend, permitting the mass mobilisation that fuelled various democratic “colour revolutions” around the world, from Ukraine to Burma (Myanmar) to Egypt. In a world of peer-to-peer communication, the old gatekeepers of information, largely seen to be oppressive authoritarian states, could now be bypassed.
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Use of bad information as a weapon by authoritarian powers would be bad enough, but the practice took root big time during the US election campaign. All politicians lie or, more charitably, spin the truth for their own benefit; but Donald Trump took the practice to new and unprecedented heights. This began several years ago with his promotion of “birtherism”, the accusation that President Barack Obama was not born in the US, which Trump continued to propagate even after Obama produced a birth certificate showing that he was.
The traditional remedy for bad information, according to freedom-of-information advocates, is simply to put out good information, which in a marketplace of ideas will rise to the top. This solution, unfortunately, works much less well in a social-media world of trolls and bots. There are estimates that as many as a third to a quarter of Twitter users fall into this category. The internet was supposed to liberate us from gatekeepers; and, indeed, information now comes at us from all possible sources, all with equal credibility. There is no reason to think that good information will win out over bad information.
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The inability to agree on the most basic of facts is the direct product of an across-the-board assault on democratic institutions – in the US, in Britain, and throughout the world. And this is where the democracies are heading for real trouble. In the US, there has in fact been real institutional decay, whereby powerful interest groups have been able to protect themselves through a system of unlimited campaign finance. The primary locus of this decay is Congress, and the bad behaviour is for the most part as legal as it is widespread. So ordinary people are right to be upset.
And yet, the US election campaign has shifted the ground to a general belief that everything has been rigged or politicised, and that outright bribery is rampant. If the election authorities certify that your favoured candidate is not the victor, or if the other candidate seemed to do better in the debate, it must be the result of an elaborate conspiracy by the other side to corrupt the outcome. The belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust.
American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life.
Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow and Mosbacher director of Stanford University’s Centre on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Copyright: Project Syndicate