There was a time in my life–teens and twenties mostly–when death terrified me. I had occasional thoughts and nightmares about falling slowly down a chute to oblivion, all the while grasping at walls that were too sheer to provide any but a momentary delay.
I haven’t been bothered by those thoughts for years. One of the nice things about growing older, if you do it right, is that your concerns broaden far beyond yourself. Having children helps. Making friends helps. Taking part in important work that engage you with ideas and people helps. All these are ways to connect to something beyond yourself, and something that will survive your death. And gradually you recognize that what truly defines you as a human being–the things you love–will survive your own death and that the part you have played in loving them will survive you as well.
Those nightmares have come back, recently. But they are not about my own survival but about the survival of the political, social, and moral ideals I’ve worked towards in both my intellectual and political endeavors and about the more or less decent and slowly improving community I’d hoped to leave my daughter, my friends, and my allies.
It’s not just Trump. It’s far more Trumpism, the neo-fascist movement that I think will be part of our political lives for a very long time.
And even more than that, it’s the near collapse of the public sphere in the liberal democracies today, a failure that is partly responsible not just for Trumpism but also for some movements on the left that strike me as deeply problematic as well.
The more or less rational process of discussion and debate that is the public sphere is being eroded, and not slowly.
There was a time when there were ideas that could not be repeated for long because they would immediately be challenged with reason and evidence and almost everyone who lives and works and thinks in the public sphere would come to recognize them as foolish, stupid, ignorant, or bigoted.
The public sphere was, of course, never perfect. Anyone who has studied Marx know how capitalism distorts it. Anyone who has studied the history of racism knows how bigotry can survive rational inquiry for a long time. Unfettered capitalism and racism exist, after all, because a large number of people believe ideas that are deeply questionable and because it is very difficult to get a hearing for or answers to those questions.
But even while the background agreement that makes debate and discussion in the public sphere possible has always been limited and one-sided, the existence of a public sphere has made it hard for many truly bad ideas to survive for long. Marx and other figures influenced by the Enlightenment, like Frederick Douglas, rightly thought that the public sphere was diverse enough for critical ideas to find a place in which arise and flourish. And they believed that over time, the distortions of the public sphere would gradually fall away, both because of the power of critical ideas and because democratic movements would bring new ideas to people in a way that overcame the distorting effects of unjustified power and bigotry.
Marx and Douglas thought that ideas were powerful enough to help shape and movements for change even under when capitalists and racists held power and that when those movements became more powerful, the distortions of the public sphere would be reduced and a time would arise in which good ideas would be even more powerful.
I once believed all that. I’m not sure I do anymore.
The power of narrowcasting, first through radio and now even more through social media has undermined the public sphere. So has the growth of political primaries in which politicians appeal to only a subset of the electorate, and gerrymandered districts in which there is no competition of ideas at all. Structural changes in how we communicate with one another and elect politicians has created a world in which foolish, stupid, ignorant and bigoted ideas have a place to fester and grow without being called into account by criticism. As these pockets of horrible ideas have grown—and the gap between left and right has grown wider—the public sphere in which ideas are subject to critical analysis and debate shrinks. People can say anything within partisan and ideological bubbles without fear of being challenged or contradicted. And when that happens, the sense of responsibility to norms of honesty and truth on the part of public officials and intellectuals decline. People who were once unwilling to speak and approve horrible falsehoods for fear of the criticism they would generate now repeat and applaud them endlessly.
And as those lies become repeated, they become the conventional wisdom among a sector of the population. Look at the Facebook pages of any friends you have on the right and you will see utterly bizarre ideas that have no basis in logic and no evidence to support them repeated as if they were obvious. Some of those ideas are put forward by people who are dissembling. The know better but also know that their grotesque lies are a path to power. But more and more of the people who repeat those lies simply don’t know any better. They repeat what everyone knows because this is what everyone they know believes.
Once a shrinking public sphere makes it possible for grotesque lies to become a path to power, the power generated by dishonesty further corrupts the process of discussion and debate. Right wing radio and targeted social media made it possible for Trump to attain power with a thoroughly dishonest campaign of lies and bigotry. And now that he has attained the power of the presidency, which both amplifies his voice and enables him to use the enormous power of the federal government to reward and punish, Trump has bent a whole party to his will. The collapsing public sphere makes it possible for public officials and intellectuals to tell any lie without fear of contradiction. The power of political office, and especially the presidency, demands that they tell those lies.
As president Trump can direct government contracts to his friends and away from his enemies as he did in ordering the Department of Defense to deny Amazon a huge contract to upgrade computer and network systems in order to punish the Washington Post Jeff Bezos also owns. He can tell the Justice Department who to reward and who to punish, as he has done in the Roger Stone case. He can tell foreign countries to aid his campaign for his re-election. He can ignore traditional and lawful request for information from a Congress charged by the Constitution with exercising oversight over his behavior and that of his administration. He can declare emergencies where there are none and spend money Congress has not appropriated on projects Congress has not authorized. And, soon, I’m afraid, we will see that he can declare emergencies where there are none in order to suspend our liberties.
The further Trump goes, the fewer voices there in his party willing to hold him accountable. Neither Trump nor his Republicans acolytes fear that their deceptions will be uncovered. Within the shrunken public sphere in which Republican live, the audience for criticism of Trump and Trumpism is almost nonexistent and the critics few and far between. And as Trump’s power has grown, the costs of speaking have become steeper. At each step of the way, the corrupt use of power has bent Republican politicians who know better to Trump’s will and further undermined the willingness of anyone to call Trump to account.
One cannot survive as a Republican today unless one echoes the latest Trump lies, even if they are diametrically different from the lies he told yesterday.
And we need to be clear that this is not just a phenomenon that affects the other side. There is absolutely no moral equivalence between the utter disregard for truth that characterizes the right today and what we see on the left. Ideas are still challenged, alternatives put forward, and criticism is constant on our side. But one can also see among certain groups the kind of impatience with disagreement that shrinks the space for debate. People block others on social media simply because they have a different opinion—or even worse when they back up those opinions with good arguments and evidence. Or those arguments and evidence are met not with alternative arguments or evidence but with insults and accusations of corruption and malfeasance that, in some circumstances, generate an avalanche of invective. We have seen that among supporters of Bernie Sanders but—and this is important for everyone those who oppose Sanders to recognize—not just there on the left and left-center.
And the problems I see on the left are not just the growing willingness to divided into sects. It is also the inability to listen to those outside our own group. There are good and decent Republicans and former Republicans people who join us in our condemnation of Trump and his corruption of the Republican Party. They disagree with us on many matters. But in their fundamental willingness to debate and advance ideas and look to evidence they are firmly on our side. Yet too many people on our side disparage them. The notion that it might be useful for those of us on the left to engage in debate with those on the right, if only to sharpen and deepen our own ideas, is seen by too many of us as a precious and unnecessary idea from a bygone age. My teacher, the Democratic socialist political theorist Michael Walzer, taught a course with the libertarian political philosopher Robert Nozick not long before I got to graduate school. And Walzer encourage me to study with Nozick and the Straussian political theorist Harvey Mansfield (who wound up as the second reader of my dissertation). Would such a course could be taught today or any students to take it? Are the descendants of Walzer and Nozick friends today?
The troubles I see on the left as very far from the utter collapse of truth and honest on the right. It is not too soon to be aware of them as part of an effort to rebuild and expand the public sphere.
But is that still possible?
I’ve spent my intellectual career writing about the political and social transformations we need to expand democratic debate and government into every part of our lives. I’ve spent my political career devising tools and strategies to help enhance the power of everyday voices ino political decision making.
Now it’s hard not to think that all those efforts have been overwhelmed by the political and social transformation that have terribly weakened the public sphere that has been is central to the ideas I’ve developed about expanding democracy in my writing and to my practice of democratic politics.
It’s far too easy to imagine the forces that are shrinking the public sphere becoming more powerful, not just on the right but on the left. And it’s far too hard to imagine how to fight back against those forces.
For the first time in my life, I see no path forward—no reforms to embrace, no policies to advance—that can protect let alone expand the public sphere. Obviously, we have to defeat Trump. There may be public policies that can undermine some of the emotional appeal of Trumpism. And perhaps, if Trump’s fascism can be overcome, we can try to reengage more of our fellow citizens and our political leaders in honest discussion and debate, we can expand the public sphere again.
But the problems to which I’m pointing go far deeper than Trump’s fascism, if only because we can see them on our side as well as on the other side. They point to ultimate failure of the Enlightenment project. And to those problems I have no answers.
And, that, perhaps, is why the dream of falling down a chute into oblivion has come back to haunt me, both when I sleep and when I’m awake.