Can the Information Age Handle Democracy?

A Review of "The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media and Perilous Persuasion" by Sean Illing and Zac Gershberg

“Democracy is difficult” would be an appropriate adage for Sean Illing and Zac Gershberg’s recent The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion. Tack on “difficult, but important” and you’d more or less understand the main lesson of the book.

Illing, a reporter for Vox and host of the Gray Area podcast, and Gershberg, a professor of journalism at Idaho State University, are well situated to make this claim. Their book is that rarest of things: a passionately argued defense of the democratic public sphere, released in a lingering moment of political crisis, that is nonetheless icily brutal in pouring cold water on liberal utopianism. This makes it vital reading with some hard lessons.

The Paradox of Democracy

At the heart of Illing and Gershberg’s book is their titular assertion of a “paradox” that has always, and will always, underpin democratic life. This paradox is nicely summarized at the beginning:

“We call this the paradox of democracy: a free and open communication environment that, because of its openness, invites exploitation and subversion from within. This tension sits at the core of every democracy, and it can’t be resolved or circumnavigated. To put it another way, the essential democratic freedom—the freedom of expression—is both ingrained in and potentially harmful to democracy. We state this at the outset because it helps frame everything that follows. More than a regime or a governing philosophy, democracy is both a burden and a challenge. Like the Greek mythological hero Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to roll a rock up a hill for all eternity, democracy is an unwieldy boulder continually throwing us back into an absurd situation.”

Grim stuff.

To support their thesis about the “paradox of democracy” much of the book is taken up with a lengthy and detailed history of democratic public spheres. Some of the stories Illing and Gershberg recount will be familiar to many readers, others are quite surprising. But throughout, their combination of literary talent and sobriety keeps readers engaged.

Their tale begins in ancient Athens, the world’s first relatively large scale democracy. Illing and Gershberg highlight how Athenians correctly regarded their novel political system as more than just a political system. It was an entire culture, fostered by faith in free discussion and expression at every level of governance.

Many Athenians took great pride in this innovation, stressing how it elevated the virtue of citizens and required them to take an interest in civic affairs. In his epic The Peloponnesian War, the historian Thucydides evokes Pericles’s soaring defense of Athenian democracy, having him claim there was no “exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.”

Since then, all defenders of democracy have dreamed of a public sphere that was both free and spirited while being rational and elevating. But Illing and Gershberg stress how from these early days there were critics who deflated this aspiration.

Plato famously remonstrated the “sophists” of his day for using rhetoric to make a weak or immoral argument appear stronger than it was. Plato’s objections inspired because his own master, Socrates, had been tried and executed for the crime of telling Athenians the truth about themselves and offering pointed criticisms of their common sense doxa and religious values. In the end Athenian democracy self-immolated several times before fading into history, taking much of the prestige of democracy with it for 2000 years.

More novel, and striking, is Illing and Gershberg’s chronicle of the early American republic. They stress how there is a longstanding bad habit of offering hagiographies of the American Founders, right down to the funny tendency to use the capital F when discussing them. This is in part because of the constructed image of figures like Jefferson, Madison, and John Adams as bastions of reasoned debate and honorable compromise.

Such a view belies the often very messy, and very painful politics that emerged post-Independence. Illing and Gershberg point out how Federalists tried to silence Jeffersonian Republicans with the heavy hand of state power, leading to accusations of tyranny and authoritarianism that read like something off of post-Musk Twitter. Worse, when Jefferson took office on a righteous tide of calls for freedom, he immediately began grumbling about the unfairness of the press and its propensity to scandal monger without regard for the truth.

The book doesn’t limit itself to antiquity or America, but ranges widely. The emergence of Italian and Nazi fascist parties comes in for extensive treatment.

Illing and Gershberg follow historian Roger Griffin in defining generic fascism as a form of populist palingenetic ultranationalism, which depended a great deal on the sinister use of propaganda and authoritarian charisma to win support within unstable liberal democracies. Russia’s complex transition from managed authoritarianism to the 1990s’ disastrous “shock doctrine” neoliberalism and back to authoritarianism is an especially intriguing section, which in my mind could do with being a bit longer.

Boris Johnson comes in for a particular ribbing, as Illing and Gershberg highlight how his amoral post-modernism affected a cool charisma in British media. At least right up until he had to be an actual adult running a real country with real people who depended on his decisions.

But of the course the book climaxes with the ascendency of Donald Trump and Trumpism on the American right. Thankfully, Illing and Gershberg take Trumpism seriously in terms of its consequences while recognizing its combination of public-facing unseriousness and conscious bombast was a big part of the appeal of post-modern conservatism. As they point out, Trump’s ghost-written The Art of the Deal gave a lot of the game away when he stressed how he is willing to use a little “truthful hyperbole” to exaggerate claims and make people excited to participate in something bigger than themselves. These skills—the one talent even Trump’s enemies should never deny him—served him when playing a successful businessman on television, before hemorrhaging that celebrity to win the Republican nomination (if current polls are right, not for the last time).

I would add to their analysis that part of the appeal of Trump’s post-modern conservatism is precisely through affirming all his contradictions by relishing in them, while refusing to grant his enemies any dignity by taking himself nearly as seriously as they did. Part of the reason Ron DeSantis isn’t doing as well as Trump in the Republican primary is DeSantis paradoxically takes Trumpism too seriously, enacting it as a principled political program and denying his followers the relish of getting to decide when they want to be taken seriously and when they simply want to troll the libs.

There was a mocking resentiment Trump channeled that is emblematic of the kinds of anger that can underpin right wing politics; a feeling that the unworthy are gaining power in society, leading to conservatives feeling they are losing status, wealth and control. Push aside all the thin appeals to “facts and logic” not caring about your feelings. The most honest defense of Trumpism came from admitting it was a giant middle finger to liberals, migrants, and all the people who Trump and his allies insisted would be the “losers” in society if only artificial means weren’t use to elevate the unworthy to the same level as the deserving winners.

Can We Overcome the Paradox of Democracy?

Illing and Gershberg’s book might be mistaken as yet another defense of the “paradox of toleration” put forward by liberals for generations. It is not. The paradox of toleration insisted that there was a clear line of demarcation between dangerously irrational views, predicated on intolerance, and good old fashioned liberal rationalism. This clarity would make it relatively straightforward for liberals to establish a functioning public sphere where respectable views were debated, while permanently exiling the bigots and radicals to the darkness of 4Chan where they belonged.

This is far too optimistic a view for Illing and Gershberg. Their reference to Sisyphus is meant as a serious metaphor. Liberal democracy’s tendency to generate or rejuvenate its own parasitic enemies before struggling to rescue itself is a permanent feature, not a bug.

Interestingly, the utopian hope of banishing disagreement from democratic politics has persisted across the political spectrum. The political right was born of Edmund Burke and Joseph De Maistre’s hostility to Enlightenment rationalism, which they saw as a fundamentally destructive force that undermined respect for authority and de-sublimated “all the pleasing illusions” necessary to keep society glued together.

But moderate conservatives since have reconciled themselves to forms of democratic life, while stressing the need to restore respect for tradition to provide a common vocabulary of enduring wisdom within which debates can take place.

Liberals initially put their faith in an ideological fusion of faith in Enlightenment rationalism and free speech, assuming that the two would always abet one another by elevating the public discourse and educating the masses to be responsible citizens. The prospect that free speech could be weaponized against Enlightenment rationalism only became seriously contemplated in the early 20^th century, when liberal democracies like Weimar Germany saw reactionary parties successfully win hearts and minds through mythmaking and promises to destroy the Republic. And yet too many liberals still retain a faith that Enlightenment’s virtue are all but self-evident, leaving them ill-prepared to recognize the appeal of those who want to roll back the tide of egalitarian modernity.

Even the left—often happy to politicize everything—has its own narratives on how disagreement will disappear. Marx, mature Enlightenment thinker that he was, held that capitalist social relations led people to adopt a distorted view of the world defined by reification and fetishism. But with the transition to a new kind of society, human beings would finally shed their lingering illusions and see the world rationally and scientifically.

Today Jurgen Habermas, whose work is discussed at length in The Paradox of Democracy, dreams of a world of communication undistorted by the selfishness and egoism that emerge when the market colonizes social life. Citizens will communicate with one another by reason sharing in “ideal speech situations,” and reach the best conclusions about what laws should govern without appealing to authority or prejudice.

Illing and Gershberg would likely regard all of these solutions as naïve, but I’m not sure that is entirely true. One area their book is a little silent on is the political economy of contemporary media, which would seem to be important in the post-Citizens United era of American politics.

Illing and Gershberg are both fans of the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, who famously taught us that the “medium is the message.” Aka the form of your expression matters as much, or more, than the content. If you’re on Twitter and trying to make a serious academic argument, then good luck to you. Ditto if you’re writing a book and think anyone will find a disjointed series of putdowns convincing.

All of this is true, but too disconnected from the very economic side of modern media from the Gutenberg press onwards. Hundreds of billions of dollars are now spent around the globe to try to sway, bedazzle, and bully people into adopting the “correct” viewpoint. Understanding these dynamics, not to mention why the money and energy is spent where it is, seems very important to grasping our current media moment, and what we can do to fix it.

Despite this one limitation, The Paradox of Democracy is a great book that deserves serious readers. In a moment of constantly battling talking heads it offers that rarest of qualities—real optimism of the will about democracy, coupled with genuine pessimism of the intellect about its pitfalls.

They say the best of friends are those who will be honest about your flaws. If that’s the case, democracy has few better friends than Sean Illing and Zac Gershberg.