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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

I don't think democracy can survive if people in a nation can't form a consensus on basic features of shared, objective reality.

This type of consensus did exist, and could be reached, in the 1770s, long before centralized mass media. The creation of competing "chains of trust", which see an election as legitimate or illegitimate, a virus as dangerous or fabricated, is actually only possible by the manipulation of mass media. And social media very much is mass media. It's just a version in which propaganda is funneled through the mouths of its target audience.

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Did it exist? In the early 1770s, there was a pretty big war on the subject of who's in charge; the late 1770s were subject to the Articles of Confederation, famous for their complete failure to establish political legitimacy for the federal government.

Even in the constitutional era, there were constant questions with foundational implications. Is slavery moral? Should Native Americans be forced to move wherever the government finds convenient? Can states secede if they don't like the election results? These were all active disputes at the time, with competing "chains of trust" on both sides.

You might want to analyze that idea of consensus in the late 1770s. At the onset of the American Revolution, at least a third of the fledgling country was monarchist to one degree or another and bloody, deadly fights between independence sympathizers and monarchists were common among the civilian population (I'm not even speaking here of military hostilities). People were often lynched or tarred and feathered in the streets for saying the wrong thing. Tarring and feathering are not nearly the funny things their description might bring t mind by the way.

It couldn't be reached then either. Think about how many different versions of Christianity there was then. There was no mass media to speak of then, and yet these versions of the Christian faith disagreed on some extremely fundamental points, including how to, and through whom, you could be saved.

We can with a shift towards the Switzerland model, but practically, that's very difficult to do.

Will you expand on this? Switzerland's model of what?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_democracy

Well people are already sorting themselves by moving between states based on political affiliation. If we strengthen States' rights and limit Federal government power in line with the original intent of the Constitution then I think we can all mostly get along. Americans get all worked up about who wins the Presidential election because the executive branch has gained so much power over every aspect of our lives but it doesn't have to be that way. We don't need to have all the same laws in Massachusetts and Montana.

Please read up on the election of 1800.

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