How Informational Overload Destroyed American Democracy (Maybe)

[A slightly different version of this essay appears in Current.]

James Davison Hunter's new book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Politics Crisis, is a wonderful, provocative, and also I think ultimately depressing synthesis of America’s cultural history. “Wonderful” because, while Hunter–as he says at the outset of the book–provides no new historical research, the “selective and interpretive history of American public and political life” (p. xv) which it provides is filled with insights and comparisons worth pondering. “Provocative” because those insights and comparisons point out connections that reveal deep-seated problems that sit directly alongside the very assumptions which most of those who value the liberal democracy Americans have attempted to build over the past two and a half centuries hold dear. And ultimately somewhat “depressing” because, despite the book’s Coda explicitly invoking the idea of hope and providing descriptions of the conditions for such regarding America’s future, it is hard to take in the cultural scope of those aforementioned deep-seated problems and not think, whatever his protestations, Hunter may well be convinced that American-style liberal democracy will not emerge from its present crisis–and as someone who explicitly describes our country’s particular political experiment as “among the greatest achievements of human history” (p. xvi), that can’t help but come off as a little sad.

Let’s begin with the wonderful and provocative parts first. In writing a history of the cultural underpinnings of America’s liberal democracy, Hunter begins by refusing to specifically define what it is he’s talking about. The closest he comes is when he writes that the “ideational center-piece” of democracy in America includes “the premises and principles of individual and collective freedom and representative self-government,” along with the recognition that “society is inherently diverse in its interests, ideas, values, and commitments,” necessitating the creation of governmental “mechanisms for addressing...differences in ways that can lead to common goods” (p. 13) Any of those premises, values, or mechanisms could, of course, be subject endless philosophical and practical debate–and it becomes clear from the start of his history that being purposefully indeterminate about those endless philosophical and practical debates is exactly the point. Repeatedly, Hunter insists that the genius of America’s expansive and always changing demos is that it has, until lately, remained capable of doing the “working through” (he prefers the German term durcharbeiten) which solidarity requires primarily because America’s self-understandings were and are not definitive, nor clear. The context in which these self-understandings arose Hunter calls America’s “hybrid-Enlightenment,” and that context involved, in his view, certain necessary conditions. But so long as those conditions obtained, the self-understandings which followed were regularly opaque, implicit, vague, inarticulable, and that is what made them so valuable, because it made America’s liberal democratic identity adaptable, yet still plausibly continuous with what came before. In his words, “a very specifically American adaptation of the Enlightenment project provided the cultural conditions for the emergence of liberal democracy in America...[and] because of its unique adaptation, flexibility, and opacity, it could in principle...evolve and adapt to historical circumstances over two centuries (p. 49).

He follows this praise of America’s liberal democratic order, however, with the sad observation that “for all that we can see, those conditions are no longer present.” Why is that?

Hunter is far too learned a scholar to propose any single overriding explanation; over the nearly 300 pages which make up the heart of his historical analysis (basically from chapter 4, “America’s Hybrid-Enlightenment” to chapter 11, “A Great Unraveling”) Hunter touches upon an enormous range of intellectual, political, and economic developments, and the responses, involving both inclusion and “boundary work,” which he presents them as having given rise to. Hunter does not present any of the cultural conditions upon which this range of ideas and arguments played out as singularly foundational, but if any comes close to that title, it’s probably what he describes as America’s “epistemology of transcendence,” a “synthesis between the Reformed Christian and secular Enlightenment traditions over the eighteenth century.” As he elaborated: “Even though it was understood in radically different and somewhat competing ways, the notion of transcendence at play was sufficiently capacious as a concept and sufficiently opaque as a sensibility that it could absorb a plurality of views, opinions, and traditions” (p. 60). Accepted by nearly all as the default presumption of nearly all argument and contestation in American life–up to and including the fight over slavery, since in President Lincoln’s famous words, both the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War “read the same Bible and pray to the same God”–this sense of transcendence endured in American life well into the 20^th century, continually allowing those in positions of authority, however constructed or challenged, to speak “a common language and a common grammar,” thereby sowing “the seeds of social solidarity” even in our deepest disputes. 

Hunter, to be sure, is not inattentive to the changes and costs involved in these disputes which what he presents as a long-enduring condition enabled. On the contrary, he lays out, with wonderfully incisive details, many stages in the articulation of, defense of, and overturning of understandings of America’s common culture. There is the rise of the America’s self-understanding as a Protestant Christian republic; its contested collapse in the wake of the Civil War and high levels of immigration; the emergence of religiously inspired (or at least informed) reform movements throughout the late 19^th and into the 20^th centuries; and then the hollowing out of such movements by the economically and technologically enabled power of neoliberal individualism in the decades immediately following World War II; and much more. While there is in all these details multiple points that could be challenged, it is, in many ways, a deeply persuasive and even wise reading of American intellectual history, climaxing in a frustrating half-century of cultural dissolution that began in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to heal America: “King’s rhetoric....generate[d] greater solidarity than ever before on matters of race in large part because his appeal drew upon underlying assumptions...embedded within America’s hybrid-Enlightenment’s surface and deep structures....It was not to last” (p. 199).

Why didn’t last? Again, Hunter provides a wide range of interrelated explanations, delving into political theories, globalizing economies, and education paradigms. But where I believe his analysis turns most provocative is in his discussion of “the nearly infinite multiplication of sources of information–the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’–and the bewildering number of choices it forces upon all of us,” adding that “the entire informational ecosystem spawned by the new communications technologies and the market dynamics by which they proliferate...render truth and reality beside the point” (pp. 306-307). Hunter never makes this connection explicit, but it seems to me an obvious reading of his cultural analysis. If liberal democratic solidarity is invariably tied up in some kind inchoate trust in the transcendent validity of that which is employed as a common language or invoked as a common authority, and if the very concept of certain principles and practices possessing some kind of transcendent validity depends upon the endurance of cultural conditions whose public meanings are, by definition, undefinable and opaque and adaptable and implicit...then is it not reasonable that the swamp of information–always highly detailed, highly personalized, and highly contentious information, to be sure!--which surrounds us all could be exactly that which is undermining those conditions? To invoke an essay on a related topic I wrote in the wake of the 2000 elections, might it be that the anger and anxiety which characterized that terrible year was at least partly due to “an omnipresent social media ecosystem which rips context from every story,” leading us to believe that “the norms held to by one, or some, or all of the different sub-communities of this country...have been, or are being, challenged, upended, revealed to be otherwise than what we believe, or maybe just simply betrayed?”

I do not mean to reduce Hunter’s wonderfully provocative reading of America’s current condition to my own pre-occupations. Still, when Hunter acknowledges the fact that the cultural conditions for liberal democracy as he understands them actually do still abound on the local level, resulting in “an abundance of goodwill among ordinary citizens who are willing to do the difficult work of coming together to find democratic solutions to the problems they face,” yet concludes that “the interconnected cultural economies of technology, media and social media, the party system, and the like...render all such grassroots efforts ineffective” (elsewhere he wrote “There is no end to good intentions among ordinary citizens, but good intentions are no match for the kind of institutional power wielded by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and their kind”), it’s perhaps reasonable to see the heart of his fear for America dwelling in the fact that our hybrid-Enlightenment adaptation was perhaps just not designed for a world of public discourse wherein “there is not no authority by which questions of truth or reality or public ethics could be settled definitively” since “it is not clear that anything is capable of penetrating [our] echo chambers” (pp. 300-301, 306, 367-369).

Hunter’s own sober and careful conclusions boil down to a hope for slow cultural work and a “paradigm shift” that would involve a sense of realism: “that the sources of social conflict can never be eliminated,” and “that politics is an administrative apparatus and is thus severely limited in what it can accomplish.” Such realism would mitigate against associating political elections with “redemptive or salvific” causes, and encourage the depoliticization of much of public life (pp. 378-380).To give his ideas some hope of survival, I wonder if his own analysis points towards the need for a more stringent structural and technological critique of how we share ideas in the first place—and how we might address the informational overload whose hyper-politicization crowds out the adaptative discussion of once more open-ended and opaque concepts, thus allowing us to do so again.