Hacker News Reader

Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

Democracy has never been in better health - more citizens are politically activated than ever before.

Remember not so long ago we (as in 'the media') were complaining about voter apathy and declining interest in politics? Now those very same voices are complaining that the people are too invested in the political process.

Like it or not, political polarization is political engagement by the people. That increased engagement is in of itself is a cause for alarm says a lot about a system where apathetic citizenry is considered the preferred state

View on HN

> Like it or not, political polarization is political engagement by the people

We went from political apathy to populism. This "engagement" is largely by people who don't know anything about politics and have their emotions manipulated by unscrupulous politicians and biased reporting.

> This "engagement" is largely by people who don't know anything about politics and have their emotions manipulated by unscrupulous politicians and biased reporting.

surely not unique to the social media age

In terms of correlation at least, yes. Between the fall and the USSR and when social media presence became the norm, people were largely apolitical. Now it's all about owning the libs/cons.

Think bigger. Longer times. It's not unique. It is human.

And Americans are human: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism_in_the_United_States

When we do it, it's democracy. When THOSE PEOPLE do it, it's dirty populism!

didn't realize everyone thought it was a slur; I should've used the term anti-politics instead

Populism is just a slur to apply to people you want to imply are too stupid to know what's good for them.

The People's Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Party_(United_States) called themselves populists, and fought for: "collective bargaining, federal regulation of railroad rates, an expansionary monetary policy, and a Sub-Treasury Plan that required the establishment of federally controlled warehouses to aid farmers. Other Populist-endorsed measures included bimetallism, a graduated income tax, direct election of Senators, a shorter workweek, and the establishment of a postal savings system. These measures were collectively designed to curb the influence of monopolistic corporate and financial interests and empower small businesses, farmers and laborers."

The establishment hated this and made a full court media and institutional press to paint them as stupid rubes. Ever since everyone who the current establishment doesn't like, especially anyone who gives a shit about what voters say they want, is called a populist.

> Populism is just a slur to apply to people you want to imply are too stupid to know what's good for them.

If you say so. It can also mean anti-politics.

The example you give is for left populism. There is also right populism, e.g. a large part of Trump's voter base.

> The establishment hated this and made a full court media and institutional press to paint them as stupid rubes.

Yes, when the establishment is neoliberal, they will hate anti-political movements.

Voters may not be rubes, but I find it hard to believe that everyone who was apathetic before 2016 and is now "engaged" is suddenly a scholar of government, history, and economics.

> Democracy has never been in better health

By which metric?

Governments around the planet are increasingly becoming more autocratic.

This 'engagement' that you speak of is not just taking an interest. It's actually radical polarization and is not healthy. There's a difference between subscribing to a particular viewpoint versus outright rage against the other 'camp'. It fractures countries and allows for populist opportunists to fester.

> radical polarization and is not healthy

agree with you on this, it is not healthy if the unit of analysis for health is society as a whole, which I believe is what you mean.

> There's a difference between subscribing to a particular viewpoint versus outright rage against the other 'camp'.

not really - I think it is only in a matter of degree!

> It fractures countries and allows for populist opportunists to fester.

democracies might just inevitably do that. If we observe democratic societies outside our own Western milieu we will observe political factions battling on the streets as much as the ballot box, or even in Parliament, as in former times we saw in South Korean and Taiwan.

What we are seeing today might just be the next stage in the evolution of democracy - this is what it looks like when we democratise mass communication, enabling not only freedom of speech but dispersing the power to amplify that speech to a much greater number of people so that many more alternative narratives can propagate and cohere. This dispersal is in itself arguably a characteristic of democratic systems.

> It fractures countries and allows for populist opportunists to fester.

Unlike those non-populist opportunists . . .

Increased polarization may be a form of engagement but it's certainly not the only way to engage and very likely not the type of engagement people were hoping for when lamenting political apathy. If anything the apathy problem was probably better viewed as "only polarized people care" not "we need more people polarized so they too care".

In my experience, most political groups these days are openly and deliberately unwelcoming to people who don't share their full set of policy preferences. If you talk to organizers, I think you'll find that polarized engagement is very much what they're hoping for.

yes - we definitely forming in-group / out-group, and in fact being additionally intolerant to those who are resisting being so grouped

" Democracy has never been in better health - more citizens are politically activated than ever before."

Yea, I guess you could call experiencing a violent coup attempt "activated". If the majority of social media engagement is people believing dubious stories and memes by hating the other side, then the engagement is worthless.

Well if people believing there was a violent coup attempt gets them to the polls, then so be it!

Political polarization is engagement sure, but of what use is engagement when the subject itself is not subjective? Seems to me there is a lot of manufactured dissent to fracture or further curb political lines. making sides about every single issue.

> Seems to me there is a lot of manufactured dissent to fracture or further curb political lines. making sides about every single issue.

yes, I think this is fair assessment.

however, democracy - and liberal society - encourages this. Social media is only an accelerant to practices which have already present - the only difference is that narrative formation itself has been democratised and so can now be more effectively contested. In perverse way, this is kind of another characteristic of democratic systems.

It could be that what we have today is the natural evolution of democratic systems, this is what it looks like when we democratize the means of mass communication. If we are not happy with this, then we need to reform the political system to encourage the outcomes we prefer. Suppressing the information is the other option, which the author implicitly endorses

But is the fracturing coming from poor leadership, or is it coming because the newly engaged grassroots demand it? Nobody will self-identify with the phrase "manufactured dissent", but I suspect the average politically engaged person would tell you that politicians are a bit too chummy with each other and it's good when activists make them confront tough issues to see where their values really lie. (Did you hear about the Schumer protest this week, where a pile of random staffers occupied his office to demand he take a harder line on climate negotiations?)

that's not what I see when I look into our parliaments – they look very oligarchic and represent fewer and fewer professions and ways of life.

yes, this is an interesting take.

The issue in this case is how we select our representatives, which I agree seems to be unrepresentative and even dynastic. The solution would require refactor of the system though, not a defence of it as the author implies in his article. It is not so much 'social media is undermining democracy' as much as social media is exposing a democratic system, which is in need of reform'

possibly as in ancient Greece at times - by lot. We have a similar situation with lay judges. For each district, exactly the same number of electoral districts and thus seats in parliament will be allocated. The remuneration will surely be interesting for many and who does not want can refuse. Draws will be made among all people living there. Including children (represented by their legal guardians in case) and illegal immigrants, former inmates and GAFAM CEOs.

Admittedly radical, but if we want to have a representative cast of the parliaments the most honest approach.

I'm up for any kind of experimentation, as I think one thing all the commentators in this thread can agree on, the current system is creaking at the seams.

How about more direct democracy? Representative democracy is a compromise for an era when the will of the people was practically too challenging to collect - something which has been solved in large part by social media. Perhaps the problems described by the author of the article is precisely the tension between a legacy system, made obsolete by new communication technology. If this is the case, we need to embrace more technology, not less and really lean into it. Maybe we could do a geo-fenced direct democracy for example?

legislation should not be delegated to a stable, forseeable, small number of possible actors. Corruption starts spot on. In a representative democracy legislation is a people duty because it is about the rules for all of us. So we have to decide.

Still the effort is brutal and requires full-time. So we need professionals (for a period), because we also need the lesser motivated people's views.

Social media (as is today) is to fragile, to toxic, to susceptible to surveillance and censorship, to centralised and to non-inclusive (in sum: non convival) to be even helpful.

Not all political activism is democratic. For example, just a bit ago some very politically active people decided to violently attack the US Capitol in an attempt to obstruct the culmination of the democratic process. That's not an expression of democratic values.

citizens wanting to overthrow a sitting gov isnt democratic ok

Maybe it is, If the majority wants to overturn their democracy, then that's also democratic. it wont be democratic after.

this is an interesting conundrum, similar to the paradox of tolerance. In the end, we will likely draw a line based on an arbitrary rule, like any authoritarian would

Yeah, political engagement was likely near its peak during the Civil War. I don't think it's as positive an aspect of polarization as the OP suggested.

It seems like an issue that a lot of this vigorous political activism is directed at disenfranchising other groups, rather than advocating for particular stances within the democratic system.

By that definition (the more political polarization, the more political engagement and better democracic health), wouldn't the healthiest the U.S. has ever been is during the Civil War? Does that not imply that the healthiest democracy is one that's in civil war? That just doesn't pass the smell test.

it does if we are able to separate 'what is good for democracy' with 'what is good for society'. It could be our current anxiety is the discovery that those two are distinct, and we can't handle the implication

Reply on news.ycombinator.com