Humainologie creative dialogue Wednesday January 19 Twilight of Democracy

“Democracy is not a spectator sport, it’s a participatory event. If we don’t participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy.” – Michael Moore

“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.” - Plato

“A healthy democracy requires a decent society; it requires that we are honorable, generous, tolerant, and respectful.” - Charles W. Pickering

As if the pandemic and the climate crisis were not enough, it now looks as if the twilight of democracy is just ahead. Thank goodness for Jane Goodall’s Book of Hope! Herewith I will append my synopsis of another book that may help us, a national bestseller by Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

Applebaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Applebaum was a columnist with The Washington Post and then became a staff writer for The Atlantic in 2020. She has impressive international experience, and it shines through every chapter of her book. An interview with her about her book is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pNgBUgZ55s She had been aligned with the Republican Party until 2008, and emphasizes that they, like various other political parties in the West which used to be identified as right-of-centre, were as a group, “at least until recently, dedicated not just to representative democracy, but to religious tolerance, independent judiciaries, free press and speech,” and other values associated with democracy. That is changing all over Europe and in the United States, where civility in political discourse is in retreat. Her book helps us understand why.

As dialogue artists, we may be able to do something about this. Maybe, if we really try to understand the root causes of the trend toward totalitarianism (yes, that word is being used by experienced observers in the United States right now), we can help turn things around. We would have to run the experiment to know the result. Let’s just start walking and see where our journey takes us.

We can get started this coming Wednesday January 19. Here’s a question we might have fun with. If you were asked to invent a game that would build participatory skills and enthusiasm for democratic participation among the players, how would you design the game? (This could be a computer game like Sim City, or a board game, or a party game, a card game, whatever; it could even be either a finite or an infinite game.)

As always, your own good questions will be the best. My question is just a suggestion for starting our journey. Building upon our initiative last Wednesday, with an open mike where we asked good questions, please come up with a good question of your own. It could even be a simple yes or no question or a multiple choice question and it could make reference to one of the quotes above or to the book synopsis appended below; or you could make it a question that calls for transformative creativity.

Here is the Zoom link provided by Shinobu:

Topic: Humainologie Dialogue Session Time: Jan 19, 2022 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Feb 23, 2022, 8 occurrence(s) Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86365003921?pwd=RkRVQVkvaHhML3FoYkRybHpOak1UUT09 Meeting ID: 863 6500 3921 Passcode: 12345

Looking forward to seeing you and hearing your good ideas and questions on January 19,

Arthur

Book: (Anne Applebaum) Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020)

In the opening Chapter of this national bestseller, the author reminds us - drawing upon her own transnational personal experience as a journalist - that the gravitational pull of totalitarianism is not unique to any specific time or place in history. She also reminds us that the predisposition to support authoritarian leaders is not unique to the left or right. “Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: There is nothing intrinsically ’left-wing’ or ’right-wing’ about this instinct at all. …It is suspicious of people with different ideas. …It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.” For example, “An authoritarian sensibility is unquestionably present in a generation of far-left campus agitators who seek to dictate how professors can teach and what students can say.”

Raising the question of what has caused the transformation currently taking place, Anne Applebaum writes, “There is no single explanation, and I will not offer either a grand theory or a universal solution. But there is a theme: Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.” Published before the January 6, 2021, attack on the capitol building, the book emphasizes that the new right both in the US and the UK, “want to overthrow, bypass, or undermine existing institutions, to destroy what exists.” Applebaum notes that democracy is inherently unstable, susceptible to demagoguery, and cites another author, Karen Stenner, a behavioral economist, who “has argued that about a third of the population in any country has what she calls an authoritarian predisposition….”

In her chapter entitled “How Demagogues Win,” Applebaum notes that monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy were familiar to Plato and Aristotle. However, “the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world …was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917.” She mentions two such states in Europe that are currently illiberal one-party states, Poland and Hungary, and provides details of their histories. She points out that instead of thinking of this as a bad thing, you can shift your thinking to argue that it is a good thing: “You can call this sort of thing by many names: nepotism, state capture, corruption. But if you so choose, you can also describe it in positive terms: it represents the end of the hateful notions of meritocracy, political competition and the free-market principles that, by definition, have never benefited the less successful. A rigged and uncompetitive system sounds bad if you want to live in a society run by the talented. But if that isn’t your primary interest, what’s wrong with it?” She emphasizes that contemporary parties that polarize European societies are different from the ideology-based Bolshevik or Nazi parties. “Most of them don’t deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality.” However, “all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality.” Typically, that alternative reality has been “carefully formulated” and propagated with the help of such things as marketing and social media. Referring explicitly to the “false premise” promoted by Donald Trump that Barack Obama was not born in America, she writes “Americans are of course familiar with the ways a lie can increase polarization and inflame xenophobia.”

Chapter III, “The Future of Nostalgia” refers to a widespread tendency to think of some glorious past (often understood only superficially) as exactly what needs to be restored in order to have a better future. Although the chapter focuses on the UK and Brexit, it opens with a reference to the antidemocratic trend in central Europe since 1989. It had arisen, says the author, because many saw their democracies as “too weak or too imitative, too indecisive or too individualistic - or because they personally were not advancing fast enough within them.” And so “the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.” A totalitarian state can, after all, provide a sense of unity and harmony – just look at those synchronized crowds in Nazi Germany – and a sense that we are “making our country great again.” Democracy is not so conducive to unity and harmony. Such nostalgia does not promote a nuanced version of history, but instead a “cartoon” version as Applebaum calls it. Further, she states that there is a natural association between this kind of nostalgia and conspiracy theory – someone has stolen that glorious past. Immigrants, for example, can be used as stereotypes in the conspiracy theory. She refers to the Tory party’s manifesto written before their 2019 election campaign as an example of the antidemocratic temptation to undermine the rule of law, the manifesto stating that it was necessary now to “look at” (meaning revisit for possible revision) the “broader aspects of our constitution.” The chapter concludes with the observation that “Britain’s place in the world, even its self-definition…is up for grabs once again.” Nostalgia and whatever it takes to grab control – conspiracy theories, you name it – illustrate the gravitational pull of totalitarianism.

The title of chapter IV, “Cascades of Falsehood,” refers to the speed with which statements devoid of evidence can spread on the internet. In contrast to a bygone era of mass media in which a “national discourse” was still possible, the very isolated nature of how people now receive and send opinions or information that may or may not be verifiable, makes such a discourse impossible. Moreover, the design of algorithms gives internet users more of what they already think, rather than diverse points of view. “Because they are designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. …Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal.” In that bygone era, political conversations “took place in a legislative chamber, the columns of a newspaper, a television studio, or a bar, now they often take place online, in a virtual reality where readers and writers feel distant from one another and from the issues they describe, where everyone can be anonymous, and no one needs to take responsibility for what they say.” People are aware of the cacophony and for many of them, they just want something more like harmony. “Democracy has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.”

In chapter V, “Prairie Fire,” the author writes, “Americans have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, was impossible to reverse.” Furthermore, “optimism about the possibilities of government has been coded into our political culture since 1776.” Aware of the inherent instability of democracy, the architects of the US Constitution established a structure intended to give democracy the best possible chance. America would be a fresh start, transcending the inequalities, the ethnic and other shackles of the past. And yet “from the beginning, there were also…different versions of what America is or should be….” She refers to anarchists from Emma Goldman onward – her chapter title refers to the title of a 1970 statement from the Weather Underground - as well as to right wing extremists including evangelicals and Patrick Buchanan; and then turns attention to more recent history of the Republican Party. Her own break with the Republican party “came in 2008, thanks to the ascent of Sarah Palin, a proto-Trump, and the Bush administration’s use of torture in Iraq.” She describes the case of Laura Ingraham, a Fox News broadcaster who was an early and ardent supporter of Donald Trump. There is a mindset shared by Ingraham and many others who see the America of the present as, among other things “a place where universities teach people to hate their country” and therefore think “Any price should be paid, any crime should be forgiven, any outrage should be ignored if that’s what it takes to get the real America, the old America, back.”

In the sixth and final chapter, “The Unending of History,” Applebaum finds some reason for optimism in a cosmopolitanism of the younger generation and others. “Europe, America, and the world are full of people – urban and rural, cosmopolitan and provincial – who have creative and interesting ideas about how to live in a world that is both more fair and more open.” There is no way to know what will happen, she says, and we may indeed slip back into a totalitarian era in the West similar to those two dark decades of the twentieth century. In closing, she writes this: “We always knew, or should have known, that alternative visions of our nations would try to draw us in. But maybe, picking our way through the darkness, we will find that together we can resist them.”