A Five-Alarm Fire for American Democracy

Feb 11, 2022

By Lawrence M. Eppard

The warning signs of serious decline for many democracies worldwide are “flashing red.” In the U.S., we may be on the verge of the “greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War” and quite possibly the “suspension of American democracy as we have known it,” in the words of Robert Kagan.

The problems facing American democracy are numerous, including (but not limited to) misinformation and disinformation, election subversion efforts by leading political figures, loopholes in the Electoral Count Act, partisan media outlets, political polarization, negative partisanship and tribalism, erosion of support for democracy and growing support for authoritarianism, weakening of social cohesion, government gridlock and dysfunction, an attempted coup, the “Big Lie,” an insurrection, partisan election audits, increasing authoritarianism among state legislatures, threats to elected officials and election workers, and talk of secession.

I want to focus my discussion on two of these related threats: misinformation/disinformation and efforts to subvert our electoral system.

The U.S. is in what many have called a “post-truth” age. For millions of Americans, feelings are becoming more important than facts and people are increasingly comfortable bending reality to their beliefs—instead of adjusting beliefs to match the evidence. The very notions of facts and expertise are being rejected by large numbers of Americans.

At first glance this may seem incongruent with the fact that Americans have easier access to factual information, and more of it, than ever before.

Imagine traveling back in time and asking a person that you met there to take you to their best library. Now imagine, once arriving in the building, pulling your smartphone from your pocket and explaining, “This tiny device gives me access to exponentially more information than this entire library.” You would leave him or her speechless.

With all of this high-quality information at our fingertips, why do so many of us fall for misinformation and disinformation? A good portion of the blame can go to the internet, the decline of traditional news outlets and rise of partisan ones (including cable news, talk radio, and partisan websites), and the rise of social media.

Despite easy access to more high-quality information than ever before, we also have easy (and often easier) access to more low-quality information than ever before. Millions of Americans do not know the difference between credible journalism and biased partisanship, lock themselves in ideological silos which continuously feed them messages and information that supposedly confirm their beliefs, and become addicted to low-quality information. There are valuable tools that can help, but many Americans are either unaware of or unwilling to use them.

Imagine sitting at a table in a restaurant. Along comes your server with a plate of healthy food and places it on your table. At this point, 100 percent of the food in front of you is healthy. But before you can take a bite, another server places three more plates on the table containing unhealthy food. Now only 25 percent of the food on the table is good for you.

If you desire to eat healthy during this meal, have these additional plates made your goal less attainable? Only if (a) you are unable to identify which plate contains the healthy food and/or (b) you are unable to resist the temptation to eat off of the other plates. This is a good metaphor for the current news media landscape.

Our human brains are hard-wired to look for information that makes us feel good, avoid information which does not, and interpret information in a manner that makes it consistent with what we already believe and maintains our highest sense of self. This is true for everyone regardless of their political orientation. Most of us try to avoid information that might destabilize our view of the world and/or threaten our core beliefs, identities, and deeply held opinions. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains, “When the facts conflict with. . . sacred values, almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence.”

When we only have a few sources of mostly high-quality information available to us, our cognitive biases are kept somewhat under control. But when there are seemingly endless sources of information available to us, and we have difficulty differentiating what is credible from what is not, our cognitive biases are unleashed to do their worst.

Think back to the movie Jurassic Park. In that film, the dinosaurs do not pose much of a threat to park patrons when the security systems are working. But once Dennis Nedry deactivates them? Well, hold on to your butts—at that point, the dinosaurs eat people. Partisan news outlets, the internet, and social media have deactivated the security systems that kept our cognitive biases somewhat at bay. Now misinformation and disinformation help diseases once thought to be a thing of the past to rear their ugly heads again. They destabilize democracies. This is not some minor problem.

Lee McIntyre explains that:

“The cognitive bias has always been there. The internet was the accelerant which democratized all of the disinformation and misinformation and diminished the experts. Democratization has led to the abandonment of standards for testing beliefs. It leads people to think they are just as good at reasoning about something as anybody else. But they’re not. At the doctor’s office, I don’t ask for the data and reason through it myself and decide on the course of treatment. It takes expertise and experience to make that judgement. Just like I can’t fly my own plane. There is a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where he is in the room with all of these goblets and chalices and doesn’t know which one is the Holy Grail. That’s where we are right now. We have the truth right in front of us, but we don’t know which one it is.”

Tom Nichols writes that:

“These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learn anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge. This is more than a natural skepticism toward experts. I fear we are witnessing the death of the ideal of expertise itself, a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers—in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.”

Or as Yevgeny Simkin writes:

“Let’s take a short walk down memory lane. It’s 1995. A man stands on a busy street corner yelling vaguely incoherent things at the passersby. He’s holding a placard that says ‘THE END IS NIGH. REPENT.’ You come upon this guy while out getting the paper. . . No reasonable person would think of convincing this man that his point of view is incorrect. This isn’t an opportunity for an engaging debate. . . Now fast forward to 2020. In terms of who this guy is and who you are absolutely nothing has changed. And yet here you are—arguing with him on Twitter or Facebook. And you, yourself, are being brought to the brink of insanity. . . [Social media is] responsible for the tearing apart of our social fabric. . . An insidious malware slowly corrupting our society in ways that are extremely difficult to quantify, but the effects of which are evident all around us. Anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, QAnon, cancel-culture, Alex Jones, flat-Earthers, racists, anti-racists, anti-anti-racists, and of course the Twitter stylings of our Dear Leader.”

A prime example of the threat that misinformation and disinformation pose to American democracy is the ongoing campaign—what has become known as the “Big Lie”—to delegitimize and overturn the free and fair election of President Biden.

As Will Saletan writes in the Bulwark:

“Americans like to think our country is immune to authoritarianism. We have a culture of freedom, a tradition of elected government, and a Bill of Rights. We’re not like those European countries that fell into fascism. We’d never willingly abandon democracy, liberty, or the rule of law. But that’s not how authoritarianism would come to America. In fact, it’s not how authoritarianism has come to America. The movement to dismantle our democracy is thriving and growing, even after the failure of the Jan. 6th coup attempt, because it isn’t spreading through overt rejection of our system of government. It’s spreading through lies.”

Saletan notes that:

In the last four Economist/YouGov polls, most White Americans without a college degree said President Biden did not legitimately win the presidency.
Three-quarters of Republicans in a January/February 2022 Economist/YouGov poll said they believe that Biden did not legitimately win the election.
An October 2021 Quinnipiac survey found that 94 percent of Democrats said former President Trump is undermining democracy, while 85 percent of Republicans said he is protecting it.
In a December 2021 survey from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 61 percent of Republicans said Biden is illegitimate because fraudulent ballots supporting him were counted by election officials.
- Forty-six percent said ballots supporting Trump were destroyed by election officials.
- Forty-one percent said voting machines were re-programmed by election officials to count extra ballots for Biden.
In a Politico/Morning Consult poll from January 2022, more than 60 percent of Republicans said that in terms of violating the Constitution, the election was at least as bad as the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.
- Two-thirds of these people (or 43 percent of all Republicans) said the election was worse.

An overwhelming amount of evidence demonstrates that these ideas are false, and yet their support is widespread.

Saletan closes by saying:

“We’re in a battle to save democracy, but the battleground isn’t values. It’s facts. We’re up against a party that spreads, condones, excuses, tolerates, and exploits lies—lies about our political process, and lies about an attempt to overthrow our government—in order to make Americans think that the party of authoritarianism is the party of democracy. And we’re in serious danger of losing.”

Misinformation and disinformation have been powerful weapons that leading political figures in America have used recently to further their authoritarian efforts to subvert democracy.

Recent examples of election subversion include former President Trump admitting to wanting former Vice President Pence to overturn the election at the electoral vote counting stage. Kimberly Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, argues that we desperately need to fix the Electoral Count Act (ECA) for this very reason. Even though the ECA was not intended to give the Vice President the power to single-handedly overturn an election for no good reason, it is vague enough that somebody might be able to abuse it to that end.

Wehle explains that:

“There are massive holes in the Electoral Count Act. It is stunning that there is nothing requiring states to count the popular vote. Arizona is proposing legislation to ignore the popular vote and allow the state legislature to pick the electors. That is not democracy. If this is not addressed, state legislatures and/or Congress can steal the next election. The future of our republic is at stake.”

Other alarming examples of recent election subversion efforts in the U.S. include (but are not limited to):

Trump prodding and threatening Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to flip his state from Biden to Trump (NBC News).
Eighty-four GOP officials across seven states (including local GOP leaders, current office holders, and current candidates for public office) sending fraudulent documents to the National Archives in the hopes that these fake “alternative slates of electors” would be taken seriously and play a role in overturning the election (the New York Times, the Bulwark).
Trump bringing leaders of the Michigan legislature to the White House to try to convince them to incorrectly certify that their state went for Trump when in fact it went for Biden (Politico).
Partisan state election audits (Brennan Center).
Trump wanting to seize voting machines and records (Politico, the Bulwark).
Trump calling governors and local election officials to try to pressure them to fabricate voter fraud (USA Today).
The January 6, 2021 insurrection (New York Times).
Trump floating pardons for those who stormed the capital on January 6 (Politico).
Trump wanting to install Jeffrey Clark at the DOJ to carry out his election subversion schemes (the Bulwark).

American democracy is under serious threat. As Michael Gerson laments, recent developments in the U.S. are “revealing the frightening fragility of the American experiment.” And as Jonathan Last warns, “America faces an authoritarian peril.”

Much needs to be done to save American democracy. Loopholes in the Electoral Count Act need to be addressed immediately before the midterms. State legislatures should not be permitted to change the rules in an authoritarian effort to overturn the will of the voters. Partisan media outlets should be held accountable for spreading misinformation and disinformation—whether that is through government regulation or the widespread promotion of nonpartisan media nutritional information (like the excellent ratings produced by NewsGuard) is up for debate, but these outlets should not be allowed to continue to poison the American mind.

This is just a start, but an important and necessary one.

This is a five-alarm fire for American democracy, and we are all going to have to do our part to put it out—and there is little time to wait.