elections
A ‘Damning Indictment’: Eight Million Voters May Be Disenfranchised in General Election, MPs Find
A staggering eight million people could be disenfranchised and prevented from voting at this year’s crucial general election in a "damning indictment" of the UK's democracy, a new parliamentary report has found.
The House of Commons’ Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee has found that the current electoral registration system is inefficient and ineffective, and the new requirement of having to show mandatory voter photo ID at the ballot box will make matters worse.
Labour MP Clive Betts, the committee's chair, said: “Elections are the cornerstone of our democracy and yet we are burdened by a system which is both ineffective and inefficient, where millions of people are disenfranchised because they are incorrectly registered or not on the electoral register.
“In the year of a general election, this is a damning indictment of the UK’s electoral registration arrangements and a threat to the rights of British voters.
“Our voter registration system is creaking. Recent changes such as voter ID have been tacked onto a Victorian era system which is failing voters, political parties, and election officials.
“We need a major review of our election arrangements to boost voter registration and to ensure our elections are seen as credible and legitimate. It is a major and fundamental defect in our democratic system that many millions of UK citizens face being unable to make their voice heard at election time.”
The report singles out young people, renters, ethnic minorities, and those in lower socio-economic groups as significantly less likely to be registered to vote.
The committee was also told that some disabled people do not feel supported to register to vote, and that they particularly struggle with the lack of variety in communication channels.
The report calls for a widening of acceptable forms of voter ID – including travel passes outside London, emergency services passes, and police warrant cards.
The Government did not agree to extending the list of acceptable photo voter ID passes, but research has shown that, at last year’s local elections in May, some 740,000 people – about 4% of the voters – were turned away because they did not have adequate ID.
As reported by Byline Times previously, the Government has been focusing on changing the law to allow more British citizens living abroad to vote. The move would enable an approximately 3.4 million more expatriates living overseas to participate in the next election – though secondary legislation to do this has yet to be passed by Parliament and no guidance has so far been issued.
The committee states that it is concerned about how the change would be "fully implemented by the next election" and that the "remaining provisions are more complex to introduce than voter ID, exacerbating the pressures of election time because of applications for voter authority certificates, overseas applications, and the reapplication of postal votes".
“This increases the risk of something major going wrong at a national election, including large numbers of people being turned away or voters not put on the registers in time to vote which would impact the current high level of confidence in the electoral system,” it adds.
The committee also wants to see people be encouraged to register to vote, through other bodies signposting individuals as to how they can get their names on the electoral register. It suggests that bodies such as the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue and Customs, the Driver Vehicle and Licensing Agency, and HM Passport Office could do this.
The report recommends that registering to vote also be signposted when national insurance numbers are issued to citizens, when they turn 16, as a way of ensuring that more young people are placed on the electoral register. It cites Canada, which has a similar electoral system to the UK as a good example – there provincial authorities have mandatory lessons in schools helping pupils to register to vote.
A spokesperson for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said: “We are committed to ensuring everyone can have their say in our democracy.
“Individual electoral registration has stopped fraud and ensured a more accurate register. The 2019 General Election was contested on the largest ever electoral register.
“As recommended by the independent Electoral Commission, we have introduced identification for voting in person across Great Britain, mirroring long-standing arrangements in Northern Ireland. 99.75% of English voters in the polling station cast their vote successfully at local elections in May last year and councils will provide free identification certificates to anyone who asks.”
The Government has been accused of watering-down the independence of the Electoral Commission by drawing up a "strategy and policy statement" for its work.
Since 2019, there have been just four proven cases of voter fraud, resulting in one conviction and three cautions, as shown by Electoral Commission figures.
‘Adopting Canada’s Progressive Conservative Strategy Won’t Save Rishi Sunak’s Party’
Across Britain, political commentators have been singing Pierre Poilievre’s praises. Poilievre, Leader of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party, now leads Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the polls by a 17-point margin. In all likelihood, he will be the next prime minister of Canada.
At first glance, Poilievre seems like UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s foil – something many commentators in Britain have picked up on.
Both are young Conservatives who rose to prominence in 2022 – one as opposition leader, the other as Prime Minister. Both have ascended in similar economic and political climates – in which issues like COVID, immigration, inflation, and an overheated housing market were front and centre.
Both moved the needle some 20 points for under-thirties – but only one, Poilievre, moved it in the right direction.
Perfect opposites, Poilievre has ushered in a new and almost unprecedented category of young Conservative voters, while Sunak has nearly eliminated them – with only one in 10 Brits under 40 reportedly planning to vote Conservative in the next election.
It is tempting to suggest – as many British columnists have – that Sunak and the Conservatives should be modelling their political calculus on Poilievre. But this is a misreading of the political situation in Canada.
Poilievre’s policy approach and rhetoric hasn’t won over Canadians in any meaningful sense. Rather, Canadians have fallen out of love with Trudeau in a big way. What’s more, endeavours by Sunak’s Conservatives to descend into populism have mostly backfired.
There is no understating how disliked Trudeau is by many Canadians. Two-thirds look upon him unfavourably, and half believe he should resign before the next election.
Because Canadian news doesn’t travel particularly well, this is easy to overlook. To some on this side of the Atlantic, Trudeau still appears the fashionable young progressive – or the beloved, beady-eyed “Calvin Klein model” – he appeared to be in 2015.
At the moment, the country finds itself embroiled in a $60 million dollar corruption scandal that led to a precipitous decline in Liberal favourability when the news surfaced last November. Colloquially known as 'ArriveScam’, the scandal involves what appears to be reckless overspending on a mid-pandemic app created by government contractors, which was meant to speed up border declarations. But his is just one of a long string of scandals that has plagued Trudeau's administration.
Canada’s souring on the Liberals, then, has little to do with what Poilievre has done well and everything to do with what Trudeau’s administration has done poorly, unethically and scandalously.
No doubt, Poilievre is a skilled politician. But the economic and social vicissitudes of recent years have made the opposition’s job in both Canada and the UK a sinecure.
Just like in Canada, Labour’s success in the polls is in no small part owing to the Conservatives floundering, what with 'Partygate’, Liz Truss’ fall from grace, and a unlawful Rwanda plan all weighing heavily on the minds of the British electorate.
Those who believe Sunak has something to learn from Poilievre often raise housing affordability, which has long been the sine qua non of Poilievre’s campaign. Yet, in all likelihood, Canada and Britain’s respective housing crises would be in similar shape with Poilievre or Keir Starmer at the helm. The post-pandemic inflationary run that drove up housing prices in countries like Canada and the UK was mostly unrelated to which party was in power.
When commentators suggest that Poilievre’s message is resonating with Canadians, what they really mean is that his rhetoric has struck a chord. Some might recall a video of Poilievre that went viral last year, in which he calmly rebuffed a journalist while eating an apple. The video is paradigmatic of Poilievre’s approach to politics. That is, he incessantly calls for 'common-sense’ government without wading too far into the weeds of what that might entail.
Is that what Brits want of Sunak? Because Poilievre’s brash, populist tone surely resembles that of another British politician – the one who claimed to be “made of Gregg’s” – who fell sharply out of favour with voters by the time he stepped down in 2022.
Even if that is what British Conservatives want, Sunak couldn’t pull it off. The Prime Minister is a technocrat through and through, not a populist. He promised a government of “integrity, professionalism and accountability” but has not delivered. An eleventh-hour embrace of populism by the Conservatives is only likely to set the party back further.
Jonah Prousky is a London-based Canadian commentator. He has written for Canada publications including the Globe and Mail, CBC, Toronto Star, Canadian Affairs, and Calgary Herald
Migrant Rights Groups Launch Fresh Push to Ensure Migrants’ Voices are Heard in UK Elections
Community organisations have united to get the vote out among UK migrants in this year’s elections, with a new push to address low voter registration rates.
The Migrant Democracy Project, Just Register, and Citizens UK have launched a new tool, the "Can I Vote? Checker" for migrants to work out whether and how they can vote in this May’s elections or the upcoming General Election.
The online platform is designed to help UK residents from various nationalities determine their eligibility to vote, based on their citizenship and place of residence within the country.
The launch coincides with Commonwealth Day, and marks a response to concerns that many communities in the UK are unaware of their right to participate in the electoral process, potentially leading to a lack of representation among eligible migrant voters.
Under current rules, individuals from the 56 Commonwealth countries are entitled to vote in all UK elections and referendums. Similarly, EU nationals residing in the UK have the right to vote in local and devolved national elections. Many, however, are unaware of these rights.
Residents of Scotland and Wales, irrespective of their nationality, are allowed to vote in local and devolved national elections, provided they have the legal right to reside in the UK.
The "Can I Vote? Checker" aims to simplify the process for migrants to understand their voting rights by asking users to input their nationality and where they live in the UK. The tool also offers guidance to those who are not eligible to register to vote on how they can engage with the democratic process in other ways.
In some constituencies in the UK, barely half of the eligible migrant population is registered to vote, according to the Migrant Democracy Project. The creators of the "Can I Vote? Checker" argue that more registered and politically engaged voters would lead to a more representative and equitable democracy. It could also shift the political dial when it comes to "toxic" narratives about migrants in Parliament and elsewhere.
Lara Parizotto, Co-Director of the Migrant Democracy Project, told Byline Times: “We have a General Election on the horizon and local elections, including for metropolitan mayors, happening in May which will shape policies affecting people's everyday lives, on housing, transport, education, and everything in between.
“These decisions cannot happen without migrants' input. However, voter registration rates amongst eligible EU and Commonwealth citizens are only 66% compared to 87% for UK nationals.”
The barriers to democratic participation for migrant communities in the UK include a lack of translated resources and targeted messages from politicians encouraging their political participation, Parizotto says.
But the current voter eligibility rules are also “extremely complex” she adds, with Commonwealth citizens being able to vote in all UK elections but EU citizens only being able to vote in local elections, and other residents having no vote at all.
Changes brought by the Elections Act following the UK's departure from the European Union bring further changes to EU citizens' voting rights after May.
While the rules for Westminster elections are the same everywhere, voting rights for other elections differ depending on which UK nation you live in.
Parizotto says the new online translated resource can ensure “migrants make their voices heard in UK politics."
Rida, a Brazilian living in London, added: “London is my home. The UK is my home. I care about my community. I volunteer with local groups keeping our streets clean and green. That’s why I am so excited about participating in elections by voting."
Rida, who volunteers with Migrant Democracy Project on voter registration stalls, says it’s often difficult to tell people whether they can vote because some of us have dual nationalities which give different voting rights.
"Unfortunately, as someone with only Brazilian citizenship I cannot vote. My partner was born in Brazil but has Italian citizenship. Through this tool people like him can see that as an EU citizen, they can register to vote...I want those who have the right to make use of it by registering and turning up to the ballot box.
"There are so many of us migrants who can vote. I hope they get encouraged to do so, and I hope everyone gets the right to vote one day as well," she said.
Neha D'Souza, an Indian-Australian campaigns manager from Just Register, a national voter registration campaign, helped to build the 'Can I vote?' tool because she didn’t realise she could vote in UK elections when she arrived in the country five years ago.
D'Souza said “Voting is a huge deal in Australia. We have mandatory voting, so we don’t even think twice about it. When I moved here five years ago, I didn’t realise I could get involved in UK elections. I’m hoping this initiative will encourage more Commonwealth communities, particularly the large number of eligible voters who can vote in London's Mayoral Elections, to exercise their rights."
To vote in the next General Election, voters must be correctly registered, be 18 or over, be either a British citizen, a qualifying Commonwealth citizen or a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, and must not be subject to any ‘legal incapacity’ to vote – e.g. prisoners serving a sentence for a conviction. They must also bring a photographic ID to vote in person.
The rules are different for local elections, where overseas voters cannot vote, while resident EU citizens can vote.
However, most resident EU citizens will no longer be able to vote in local elections in England and Northern Ireland from May this year, as voting deals are being made between the UK and individual member states on a piecemeal basis. 16 and 17 year olds can vote in local elections in Scotland and Wales. The 'Can I Vote?' tool Is available here.
Update: This piece has been updated to correct the name of an organisation, Just Register, backing the new tool.
Do you have a story that needs highlighting? Get in touch by emailing josiah@bylinetimes.com
#VOTEWATCH24 CrowdfundER
Help us investigate disinformation and electoral exclusion as we head towards the 2024 General Election.
Byline Times and the Bylines Network want to launch the most ambitious monitoring project for this year’s elections – #VoteWatch24. We will be coordinating hundreds of volunteers across the country to show what’s really happening on the ground by sending in news from constituencies across the UK.
Wherever there is voter suppression, misinformation, or dodgy funds, we’ll be here to call it out. Across Britain, months ahead of polling day, the work is about to begin.
But we need your support to make this crucial project a reality. If we don’t make this effort, no one else will. Can you help us cover the staff and infrastructure we need to make it possible?
Yes, Lord David Cameron Could Come Back as Prime Minister – and he Wouldn’t Need to Run for MP
Foreign Secretary Lord David Cameron – or a more controversial right-wing figure – could oust Rishi Sunak and become prime minister without having to win a single vote, analysis by the House of Lords Library suggests.
The research for former Green Party Leader Baroness Natalie Bennett, seen by Byline Times, comes as Sunak’s approval ratings hit a record low this week.
While the Conservative Party languishes in the polls, Sunak’s own personal approval rating has plunged to -54%.
The Ipsos Mori poll, released on Monday, shows that support for the Conservatives has dropped to its lowest point since its records began in the 1970s, with only 20% of UK voters currently backing the party.
The 27-point lead for Keir Starmer's Labour Party may well spark murmurings of revolt among Conservative MPs and members, desperate to claw back some support and avoid electoral oblivion later this year.
The poll suggests the Conservatives could win just a few dozen seats in the next general election – putting them behind the Scottish National Party or Liberal Democrats after an election, and hundreds of seats behind Labour.
It would mark a catastrophic cut on the 351 seats from its 2019 victory achieved under Boris Johnson. The Conservative right has long suggested ‘bringing back Boris’, though at this stage anyone could be seen by voters as preferable than the current Prime Minister.
On Monday, the Daily Mail reported a confidential gathering of Conservative MPs was held in Parliament last week, where they were presented with the profile of anonymous alternative party leader figures, with one dubbed 'Candidate X' portrayed as the potential saviour for the party in the upcoming election.
Attendees were reportedly told that the profile matched one of the candidates vying to succeed Sunak as leader of the Conservative Party.
This briefing included findings from a survey conducted by Whitestone Insight involving 13,500 voters. Polling based on anonymous untested profiles are very different to real people with skeletons in the closet who have faced opposition attacks.
However, it does show that some in the party’s upper-echelons are now willing to consider another leadership change before the election.
Former Brexit negotiator Lord David Frost – a net zero critic and so-called climate sceptic – fits the bill for the supposed ‘most popular’ mystery candidate.
The i newspaper also reported last month that some Conservative grandees were discussing replacing Sunak with Cameron, the former Prime Minister who led the remain campaign into defeat during the 2016 EU Referendum.
It is often assumed that Cameron – or any other public figure – would have to run for a parliamentary seat in order to be appointed to the top job. But the new Lords library analysis for Baroness Bennett suggests that this is merely a convention, which could be overridden without any change of law.
Bennett said that the finding highlights the “creaking failure that is the antiquated, undemocratic constitution”.
In his study 'Choosing a Prime Minister’, constitution expert Professor Rodney Brazier highlights that the monarch can appoint anyone as prime minister under the royal prerogative, a power vested in the monarch since at least 1189, which remains unaltered by Parliament.
There are no formal rules for appointment and no formal legal limits on who can be appointed prime minister.
The title 'Prime minister’ itself wasn't officially used until the late 19th Century; while the role, including its powers and duties, lacks a legal definition – even after the Minister of the Crown Act 1937, which first referenced the position to allow for an enhanced salary.
The roles of the prime minister and cabinet are primarily governed by convention rather than law, as outlined in the official Cabinet Manual. This includes the prime minister being the head of the government due to their ability to command confidence from the House of Commons and, by extension, the electorate. In theory, the sovereign can appoint whoever they wish to this role – though it would trigger a constitutional crisis and undoubtedly legal challenges.
Although prime ministers largely came from the House of Lords until the 20th Century, modern convention dictates that they should be a member of the House of Commons. The practice was solidified by instances like Sir Alec Douglas-Home renouncing his peerage in 1963 to serve as Conservative Prime Minister from the Commons.
Despite the unlikelihood of a prime minister serving from the House of Lords in contemporary times, analysis in 2023 by Dr Conor Farrington in Political Quarterly suggested that, constitutionally, nothing prevents that from occurring.
Researchers for the House of Lords Library told Bennett: “It does not appear that, beyond the convention, there is any formal mechanism preventing a member of the House of Lords from becoming prime minister.”
She told Byline Times: “That the UK’s politics is broken is obvious. It is easy to blame individuals for that, and I do, but at the heart is a broken system, an uncodified constitution assembled by centuries of historical accident, profoundly undemocratic, and incapable, as the past decade has shown so clearly, of delivering stable, secure government.
“You would think that a second Cameron prime ministership would be an impossibility, but it clearly is not, either legally or practically. The Tories, from the shortest prime ministership to the most disastrous referendum, have set new constitutional ‘standards’, so it is impossible to rule them out, returning to 1902, the last time a prime minister was in the Lords.”
Do you have a story that needs highlighting? Get in touch by emailing josiah@bylinetimes.com
The Plutocrats’ Plot To Control America
It is intimidatingly early on a Friday morning and I’m inside the bright-white Denver headquarters of Unite America, a “philanthropic venture fund” dedicated to radically reshaping the way we elect our public officials. The walls are splashed with slogans in red and blue reading things like “Country Over Party.” Depictions of the Statue of Liberty are omnipresent. A bubbly employee repeatedly offers me a bagel.
Nick Troiano, Unite America’s executive director, walks in looking abundantly boyish in khakis and a neat haircut. At 34, Troiano fronts an organization that has spent more than $70 million since 2019 pushing through electoral reforms. Unite America’s core demands are open primaries, meaning one non-partisan primary open to all candidates, and ranked-choice voting, where voters rank all eligible candidates in order of preference.
When these reforms are passed, Unite America contends, they boost moderate candidates that appeal to an “exhausted majority” of centrist voters alienated by current modes for extremism within the Democratic and the Republican parties. While the reforms may sound anodyne, Unite America is not humble in its aims: To Troiano, this is about nothing less than the salvation of our nation.
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Nobody With Real Power Cares If You Refuse To Vote For Biden
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/a263aed72563c5d2180777e188237c37/href
There’s been a lot of talk in pro-Palestine circles about withholding votes for Biden in protest of his genocide in Gaza, which is of course fine, but the discourse around doing so often misses an important point. A lot of US voters erroneously think they’d be punishing the Democrats for Gaza by costing them the election, mistakenly assuming Democrats care about winning. They don’t.
Losing an election costs Democratic party leaders nothing; all the career politicians and political operatives at the top keep their careers either way. From their point of view this is just a cushy job with sweet benefits, and they keep those win or lose. And obviously Biden himself doesn’t care; he’ll have a comfortable retirement regardless of the outcome in November, and on some level he’s surely aware that it’s nuts for a dementia patient to be in the White House anyway.
If the Democrats cared about getting your vote they’d be trying hard to earn it. They’re not trying because they don’t care.
The unelected empire managers who actually run the US power structure also don’t care who wins the election. They know they’ll still get their murder and militarism and capitalism and imperialism no matter who gets sworn in next year, whether it’s Biden or Trump or Harris or someone else. Nobody with any real power cares about your vote.
And that’s the real issue. That’s the real point that keeps getting missed here. The problem is not that the wrong people keep getting elected, it’s that the elections don’t matter and voters don’t have a say. It’s that humanity is dominated by a murderous globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around Washington whose actual movements and behavior have effectively zero responsiveness to the will of the electorate.
You’re never going to be able to vote your way out of this mess, and you’re never going to be able to not-vote your way out of this mess, because the power of your vote has been undermined to a value of zero. That doesn’t mean there’s no way out of this mess, it just means there’s no way to get out of this mess using the fake plastic diversion toy they handed you to shut you up and trick you into thinking you have a say.
There are still plenty of other tools in the toolbox for forcing an evil power structure to stop doing evil things, but they require a whole lot of hands to bring about, and right now we don’t have them. Too many people have been successfully propagandized into believing the status quo works and their government is basically good, or successfully manipulated into giving up on politics altogether and throwing their attention into other things.
Before the people can begin using the power of their numbers to force real change, they’re going to have to be awakened to the reality that everything they’ve been told about their government, their society and their world is a lie. They’ve got to come to the understanding that the mainstream news media are nothing but propaganda and they live under the most murderous and tyrannical regime on this planet. They’ve got to realize that this power structure does not ultimately serve their interests, or the interests of their fellow human beings around the world. Only when enough eyes open to this reality can revolutionary change via direct action become possible.
The good news is it’s entirely possible to help get those eyes open. Everything you do to help share the truth with your fellow citizens and spread awareness of what’s really going on pushes this possibility toward reality. The more people open their eyes, the more people there are to help open others, so this could snowball from impossible to probable to inevitable quite quickly.
An entire globe-spanning empire rests on a closed pair of eyelids. Once they snap open, the whole thing will crumble. And from there we can begin building a healthy world together.
_____________
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The Revolution Will Be Hilarious: Comedy for Social Change and Civic Power – review
Caty Borum‘s The Revolution Will Be Hilarious: Comedy for Social Change and Civic Power considers how comedy intersects with activism and drives social change. Borum’s accessible text draws from case studies and personal experience to demonstrate how comedy can successfully challenge norms, amplify marginalised voices and foster dialogue on issues from racism to climate change, writes Christine Sweeney.
Can you teach comedy? Can a sense of humour, charisma, delivery, stage presence and timing be learned? Comedy programmes popping up in universities across the world would say, “Yes, yes it can”. If the question is, “can you teach comedy as a tool for social change and civic power?”, Caty Borum has an entire book which aims to provide an answer.
The Revolution Will Be Hilarious: Comedy for Social Change and Civic Power by Caty Borum explores the intersection of comedy and social activism, delving into the question of whether comedy can be taught and used as a tool for social change. Borum discusses the role of creativity, cultural power, and participatory media in driving social change and how postmillennial social-justice organisations collaborate with comedians. Serving as a follow-up to Borum’s work co-written with Lauren Feldman in 2020, A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice, this new book is a how-to manual with case studies on integrating comedy into social justice efforts.
[The] book is a how-to manual with case studies on integrating comedy into social justice efforts.
Borum reflects on her own comedy career, drawing from experiences working with sitcom legend Norman Lear on get-out-the-vote campaigns in the late ’90s and early 2000s like Declare Yourself. While these campaigns engaged young people and demonstrated the power of comedic efforts, Borum notes that the impact on electoral outcomes was limited. Though 2004 saw the largest turnout (nearly 50 per cent) of voters aged between 18 and 24, that demographic still accounted for just 17 per cent of the total voter population, and Bush beat his democratic rival John Kerry to secure a second term.
Although mobilising the public through comedy for direct political action may be too great an ask, Borum emphasises comedy’s narrative power in shaping public understanding and influencing cultural attitudes. The book explores the evolution of comedy in the participatory media age, especially its increased visibility during the pandemic and its role in challenging societal norms. The rise of independently produced content on social media has challenged the authority of networks and studios, boosting the democratisation and creative agency of comedy “content”. Though Borum acknowledges the benefits of social media for amplifying marginalised creators, she falls short of critically examining its impact on mental health, the spread of misinformation and biased algorithms. Despite this, she underscores comedy’s potential as a cultural intervention empowered by the participatory networked media age.
Positive deviance, according to Borum, is the quiet power of comedy that journalism lacks.
The book discusses the comedic response to political events, particularly the rise of Donald Trump, positioning comedy as a force for social change by offering fresh ways of undermining the status quo. According to Borum, comedians say what journalists cannot, thinking of Michelle Wolf, who at the 2018 White House Correspondents dinner pointed out the mutually beneficial cycle of journalists covering then-President Trump’s near-constant news feed. Positive deviance, according to Borum, is the quiet power of comedy that journalism lacks.
Comedy also serves as a creative space for marginalised voices, providing an alternative narrative and critique that traditional journalism may lack. Borum highlights the importance of optimism in comedy. Comedy provides a space for an alternate reality, for example the TV series Schitt’s Creek portrays a world where the LGBTQ community is fully accepted. In this sense, optimism can be a survival tactic. As Borum suggests,
[C]omedy as a force for social justice breaks down social barriers and opens space to discuss taboo topics; persuades because it is entertaining and makes us feel activating emotions of hope and optimism; serves as a mechanism for traditionally marginalized people to assert and celebrate cultural citizenship through media representation; acts as both social critique and civic imagination to envision a better world; and builds resilience to help power continued struggle against oppression.
Borum provides an in-depth, well-researched review of cultural entertainment activists, tracking the power of the entertainment industry to affect how people feel. “Pioneering cultural entertainment activists pushed for ‘mainstreaming’ oppressed people – including and normalizing their lives and lived experiences in entertainment.”
The book is something of a documented workshop, drawing from the experiences and insights of leaders across social justice activism and comedy to emphasise the power of media.
The book is something of a documented workshop, drawing from the experiences and insights of leaders across social justice activism and comedy to emphasise the power of media. Its instructive aspect lies in Borum’s description of running comedy workshops and writers’ rooms, offering a practical guide for both comedians and social activists. These collaborative spaces aim to translate key messages into comedy routines through storytelling, making complex issues more accessible. The author uses climate change and the opioid epidemic as examples, demonstrating how comedy can humanise and mobilise audiences to address pressing challenges.
Borum examines a case study of youth political activist group Hip Hop Caucus which aims to communicate a basic awareness of climate change to Black, Indigenous, and other People of Colour, who are the most affected by, and yet contribute the least to, climate change in the US (and globally). Even if this comedy work may not reach the oil companies responsible for the brunt of climate change, it serves to educate and mobilise audiences. In this sense, the messaging of the book goes, culture is important because it is the mechanism by which we relate to each other. Although it’s hard to demonstrate the material impact of comedy and the entertainment industry overall on political dynamics, communicating the mechanisms translating individual experiences in collective narrative storytelling to foster understanding and support is convincing.
Culture is important because it is the mechanism by which we relate to each other.
The Revolution Will Be Hilarious emphasises the power of comedy as a force for social justice and provides practical insights into its integration with activism. She effectively shows how collaboration between the two has the power to start meaningful conversations around racism, climate change, economic disenfranchisement, addiction and more. Borum’s work serves as a valuable guide for media and communication theorists, entertainment industry professionals, social activists, and comedians, showcasing the potential of collaboration between comedy and activism in sparking meaningful conversations on various societal issues.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image Credit: Paul Craft on Shutterstock.
In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea – review
Jonathan White‘s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea examines how changing political conceptions of the future have impacted democracy, arguing that contemporary challenges like economic slowdown and climate change have led to reactive politics and short-termism. Though the book proposes ways to revitalise democracy, Aveek Bhattacharya suggests we may need to seek beyond our political institutions for strategies to build a more open future.
You can read an interview with Jonathan White about the book here. On Monday 11 March at 6.30pm White will speak at an LSE panel event, The politics of the future – find details and register here.
In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. Jonathan White. Profile Books. 2024.
In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea is a book about the history of the future, and what it means for the present. More precisely, it describes how the way people think about the future has evolved over time, and the impact of these changes on democracy. Jonathan White’s central argument is that while optimism for the future once helped build democracy, economic slowdown, climate change, new technology and geopolitical tension mean that “the future no longer seems its [democracy’s] friend”.
For democracy to function, White observes, it is critical that people believe an “open future” is possible: that there are alternatives to the status quo, that society can evolve in a range of different ways, and that the people can choose between them. One of the key defining characteristics of democracy – the peaceful handover of power – is premised on changeability of the future: election losers believe that they will get their chance to achieve their vision of society again.
For democracy to function, White observes, it is critical that people believe an ‘open future’ is possible
In the present, White says, it is harder to maintain that patience and faith. The future is regarded with fear and claustrophobia. At various points he describes the future, far from being open, as “closing in”. Catastrophe – societal decay, conflict, environmental collapse – feels hard to avert. Insofar as there are options, they involve deferring to technocrats. There is a “now or never” urgency about politics, and a fear that waiting your turn means leaving it too late because the other side will destroy everything.
Via a tour of historical political thinkers, White sketches the ideas of the future that make for the most vibrant democratic system. Political and social outcomes must seem open, but not in such a destabilising manner as to trigger counter-revolution from those attached to the present. A strand of utopianism can be energising but must be linked to near-term political tactics to be practicable. Efforts to limit uncertainty, to render the future predictable, through calculation and technocracy risk squeezing out the necessary imagination and mass participation of vibrant democracy. At the same time, chaotic impulsiveness and pure disregard for expertise risks descending into fascism. Trying to control the future by keeping it secret is likely to generate conspiracy theories and discontent. Consumerism individualises the future and means we no longer share in it – we move from valorising Victorian steam trains to wanting our own personal cars.
Our perpetual state of emergency, while creating unpredictability, produces reactive politics, designed mainly to return things to the way they were.
The conception of the future we have arrived at today is not, in White’s opinion, sufficiently conducive to democracy. Our perpetual state of emergency, while creating unpredictability, produces reactive politics, designed mainly to return things to the way they were. Short-termism dominates – most notably, through the election cycle, but even longer-term threats like climate change are tractable only by converting them to benchmarks and deadlines. Managerialism and secrecy dominate, empowering organisations like the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund and triggering impulsive populist backlashes.
White’s proposals for rebuilding a more positive conception of the future and revitalising democracy are somewhat surprising. He is sceptical of direct democracy – while more referendums might give ordinary citizens more chance to shape the future, they raise the stakes and perpetuate the “all-or-nothing” politics he thinks is so baleful. Small-scale councils are too small-scale to create significant change, citizens’ assemblies too short-lived to pursue a persistent vision.
White calls for ‘radical representative democracy’, with mass participation in the development of party policy and party members having greater opportunity to recall politicians who fail to deliver on those agreed goals.
Instead, he puts his chips on political parties as the crucibles of a more inclusive, compelling and hopeful vision of the future. He calls for “radical representative democracy”, with mass participation in the development of party policy and party members having greater opportunity to recall politicians who fail to deliver on those agreed goals. It’s an argument with echoes of Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void, which also claimed that the disengagement of ordinary members and politicians from their political parties had led to “the hollowing of Western democracy”.
White’s rebooted party system sounds good in theory, but invites scepticism about its practicality. His central assumption is that citizens’ disempowerment is the root cause of our current democratic malaise, and that the opportunity for greater influence will suffice to tempt enough people to give up their evenings and weekends to political causes. It is not encouraging that the existing parties that have done most to engage with mass movements and improve participation with things like online platforms – Podemos in Spain and the Five Star Movement in Italy – do not seem to have restored democratic confidence in their countries.
The Victorian capitalists who built the factories and railroads may not have been personally attractive, but they inspired progressives and socialists to dream about how their innovations could be used to benefit all.
White is oddly dismissive of the pockets of optimism that do exist outside the political system – most notably Silicon Valley, where ideas like “Effective accelerationism”, the view that technological progress is likely to obviate many of our deepest societal challenges, has taken root. For White, they display the wrong sort of optimism: too consumerist and individualistic, too inclined towards anti-system chaotic thinking, tendencies encapsulated in the figure of Elon Musk, presented as fascistoid, if not fascist. Setting aside whether that is a fair characterisation of Musk, the question it raises is why the confidence of tech companies seems so divorced from the sentiments of wider society. The Victorian capitalists who built the factories and railroads may not have been personally attractive, but they inspired progressives and socialists to dream about how their innovations could be used to benefit all. There are some – figures like Aaron Bastani on the far left and Derek Thompson on the centre left – that are trying to do something similar today, but White does not recognise them as such.
White assumes that the problems of democracy are endogenous: that they are caused by political institutions and must be resolved by them.
Most fundamentally, White assumes that the problems of democracy are endogenous: that they are caused by political institutions and must be resolved by them. But there are more straightforward explanations for the modern morosity. Stagnant economic growth, and the failure of new technologies to demonstrably improve living standards, would naturally be expected to undermine confidence that things will improve. The demographic shift to an older population in rich countries may also have contributed to a lack of vitality and enthusiasm, and a tendency to look back with nostalgia rather than forward with hope. Even among the young, we should not necessarily take perceptions at face value. Phenomena like “climate anxiety” seem to reflect anxiety at least as much as they reflect the climate, and as such will often be psychological, not just political in nature.
That’s not necessarily a comforting thought. Maybe technological abundance is around the corner, maybe the economy will turn around, maybe the mental health crisis will abate – whether by sheer luck or unusually effective action – and people will start to feel better about the future. But In the Long Run suggests that fixing democracy’s problems, renewing our faith in the open future, is a much bigger task than tweaking its institutions.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Ryan Rodrick Beiler on Shutterstock
‘A Voluntary Tech Agreement Will Do Little to Defend Electoral Integrity Against the Worst Uses of AI’
Across the globe, an estimate four billion voters will be heading to the polls this year – more than any other in human history. All the while, rapid advancements in artificial intelligence continue to draw us deeper into an era of near-indiscernible deepfakes.
As the quality, output and volume of AI-generated language, image, video, and audio advances at pace, major players in machine learning and social media have publicly committed themselves to jointly combatting the deceptive use of this rapidly advancing field of technology.
But can the threat AI poses to democracy be stymied in time?
AI images are being generated at an approximate rate of 34 million per day – that’s almost 400 images a second. In the span on 18 months, 15 billion AI generated images were created – a figure which took photographers 149 years to achieve.
The scale and quality of AI images is not going to roll backwards. Machine learning is becoming increasingly sophisticated, with AI-images permeating virtually every area of life – from social media, to marketing and news.
AI technology can capture any person’s likeness and create an entirely fabricated action for the subject to perform in either an image or a video. The technology can replicate any person’s speech and cadence and can read a script of the user’s design in their voice.
In the context of elections, fake media can fuel disinformation and misinformation about political leaders, which could influence how people vote. In the UK and Ireland, we have already seen AI-generated videos circulating of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Labour Leader Keir Starmer, and Ireland’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
Beyond explicitly visual elements, instances of insidious AI-generated websites proliferating fake news have skyrocketed, with an increase of more than 1,300% since last May, ballooning from 49 to 713 sites in less than a year, according to disinformation tracker Newsguard.
Advances in AI-generated audio have resulted in fake calls intended to interfere in elections. In January, voters in New Hampshire received calls from an AI-bot imitating US President Joe Biden’s voice.
When it comes to video content, many of us will have seen the largely benign 2021 Tom Cruise deepfake but, in the years since, this technology has become increasingly photorealistic – and weaponised.
AI technology has the potential to significantly disrupt democratic processes and artificially sway electoral outcomes to a degree never before seen. Beyond proliferating deceptive imagery, video and audio content, the technology is capable of eroding public trust in political institutions and manipulating political priorities.
Politicians, in an election year at least, are responsive to the priority issues that matter to constituents – but what if a large-language model were deployed to write tens of thousands of fake constituent letters on an issue that was not a priority for voters in that area?
Tech giants including the CEOs and creators of some of the most well-known AI service providers have repeatedly expressed concern that AI could pose a significant risk to humanity. This risk is not of the 'Skynet’ variety, but rather the more subtle societal impacts of AI technology once weaponised to alter the landscape of the society we live in – whether that’s by electoral interference, mass disruption to the labour market through technological advances, or large-scale discrimination and racial profiling.
These risks are very real, and effective safeguards are not in place to prevent interference in the democratic outcomes of elections occurring across 2024.
Recognising the looming threat it poses toward democracy, 20 tech firms – including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Open AI – have committed to work collectively in good faith to tackle deceptive AI in elections.
The Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections was announced at the Munich Security Conference last week and includes several voluntary commitments and guiding principles.
The Accord recognises that there are limitations and clearly tries to strike a balance between free speech and deliberately deceptive AI, stating that companies will deploy “reasonable precautions to limit risks of deliberately Deceptive AI Election Content being generated”, that this won’t prevent AI content in relation to elections, and as deliberate intent forms part of the review process, content could easily slip through.
Detection, education, and provenance are core planks of the agreement, with plans to deploy the same machine learning technology to instead identify and detect AI-generated election content which may be deceptive or harmful, this can be done by “developing classifiers or robust provenance methods like watermarking or signed metadata”.
Meta has previously announced that it will be watermarking AI-generated content on its platform ahead of the elections – it remans to be seen as to how effective watermarking will be, but it is a welcome step in helping the public discern between real, and machine-created, content.
The intent behind the voluntary agreement is well-meaning and suggests an appetite for collaboration among key players. "We have a responsibility to help ensure these tools don't become weaponised in elections," said Brad Smith, Microsoft president.
However, many of the commitments remain vague and toothless.
In reality, this voluntary agreement is ultimately one more pact to heap atop the dusty pile of other voluntary agreements, between countries, tech firms, and key players – including the 20-page non-binding agreement between 18 countries including the UK and the US announced last November, itself atop an earlier US-UK pact announced last May.
There is no shortage of voluntary code, flowery agreements, or handshakes – but they do little to provide tangible guardrails.
The Munich Accord identifies education as one of its key pillars, exemplifying the importance it places on citizens building the skills necessary to better protect themselves from manipulation. Yet it lacks the finer detail as to how exactly tech companies will achieve that goal, stating only that the signatories will “support educational campaigns” – exactly how robust this support would be is left open to interpretation.
Digital literacy skills are some of the most important tools for personal protection against misinformation and disinformation in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. The challenge is that these skills are not compulsory in education systems and the vast majority of potential voters who stand to benefit from proper training have already left the education system without having been adequately prepared to detect the key markers of AI-generated content.
While the technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated, it is still possible to recognise markers. For example, the responses from large language models such as Open AI’s Chat GPT have some unambiguous 'tells’ if you know what to look for. Most of us, however, haven’t been explicitly shown what form they take.
AI technology is ramp for misuse. It is the most effective and accessible tool for nefarious actors to stoke division, polarisation, and extremist policies, requiring an inversely proportional degree of effort and technical skill to harness it. While the Munich Accord aspires to counter disinformation, the policies outlined will do little to defend electoral integrity.
Machine-learning generated content is hidden in plain sight, with most of us will be engaging with some form of AI-generated content on a daily basis. Democracy has been under threat for decades, from autocrats to populists. But AI is the Goliath.
Platforms, Polarization and Democracy
So Cosma Shalizi and I have an article (messy pre-print) coming out Real Soon in Communications of the ACM on democracy, polarization and social media. And Nate Matias, who I’m friends with, has forceful objections. I’ve promised him a response – which is below – but am doing it as a blogpost, since I think that the disagreement could be turned into something more broadly useful.
Cosma and I wrote the article to push back against one version of the common claim that we can blame everything that is wrong and toxic with social media (and by extension, American democracy – this is a U.S. centric piece) on engagement maximizing algorithms and their cousins. Specifically, we don’t think that we can fully blame these algorithms for the kinds of belief polarization that we see online: people’s willingness, for example, to concoct elaborate justifications for their belief that Trump Really Won in 2020.
We do this by engaging in a kind of thought experiment. Would we see similar polarization of beliefs if we lived in a world where Facebook, Twitter et al. hadn’t started using these algorithms after 2012 or so? Our rough answer is that plausibly, yes: we would see lots of polarization. Following Mercier and Sperber, we assume that people are motivated reasoners – they more often look for evidence to support what they want to believe than to challenge their assumptions. And all they need to do this is a combination of simple search (Google like it used to be) and social media 2.0.
Search enables them to find evidence that will support their priors, while social media enables them to link to, comment, elaborate on and otherwise amplify this evidence. Because of how simple search works (it treats web links and activity as proxies for quality), the more that people link to and comment on stuff on social media, the easier it is to find, and the easier it is to find, the more that they will link to it and comment on it. We (for values of ‘we’ that actually mean ‘Cosma’) construct a simple model, which suggests that this feedback loop leads to a world where there are a few vast glob-like communities of mutually reinforcing beliefs surrounded by a myriad of smaller, and less consequential communities. In statistical terms, the sizes of different communities fall along a rough power law distribution.
Nate – who is no more a fan of the algorithmic polarization consensus than we are – takes exception to what we say. First – he doesn’t like that we use the word ‘toxicity,’ because it has no agreed-on definition, and is sometimes used as “a way to obfuscate and sidestep precision in order to avoid hard debates about democratic governance.” Second, he doesn’t like what he takes to be our “assumption that an Internet with many smaller groups would have greater toxicity and a world with fewer, larger groups would be less toxic,” and that “[s]ince [our] simulation can imagine an Internet with many small groups, [we] conclude that a toxic internet does not depend on social media algorithms.” Third, he thinks, following a recent article by Dan Kreiss and Shannon McGregor, that arguments about polarization and group size too are ways to “avoid talking about racism, sexism, and inequality.” Finally, he thinks that our model is misleading – while it is “compellingly simple,” it needs to look at “more empirical work beyond just famous papers published in Science and Nature,” and should ideally be grounded in community science.
It’s not going to surprise anyone that we, in turn, disagree with most of these criticisms (the exception is that we could certainly have been more specific in how we used the term “toxicity” and will do what we can to mitigate at this point in the production process). And perhaps there’s a more interesting and productive disagreement than you might think from academics having at it online, even in a reasonably friendly way, about what each said and meant. But to get there, we likely need to clear up some misunderstandings.
The most straightforward one is that Nate isn’t quite right about what our model says and what we argue. We don’t actually think that a world with many smaller groups would be less toxic, and a world with more big ones less so. Our argument is just the opposite of that. We think that even just with simple search and social media, the Internet creates a world in which deranged beliefs can scale more easily than they used to. Before the Internet, it was harder for people to find and glom onto mistaken beliefs that pushed against the common wisdom. This meant either that they were likely to go with that wisdom (which of course was itself usually dubious) or invent their own idiosyncratic dubious alternatives, pushing out in a myriad different directions, which to some extent canceled each other out. In our counterfactual, even simple Internet technologies of search and Web 2.0 would allow them to construct their own alternative realities, collectively, and at scale.
That counterfactual isn’t necessarily worse than the recent past, where there was high public consensus around ideas and beliefs that were often pernicious. Also, it isn’t obviously better than the world that we actually live in, which is the comparison that we are actually looking to make. Our simple model suggests that both with post-2012 algorithms and without, we end up with much the same outcome – a world where there are big agglomerations of people with fundamentally discordant political beliefs.
So what does this initially counterintuitive comparison get us? I recently read a book by the philosopher Cailin O’Connor, who independently adopted a very similar mode of counterfactual argument (she gives Liam Kofi Bright partial credit). O’Connor is interested in figuring out the causes of racism and gender discrimination. As she points out, many people attribute racism and gender discrimination to psychological biases, such as stereotype threat. She doesn’t want to discount these explanations. But she wants to investigate whether we would still see large scale gender and racial discrimination in a world where human beings weren’t biased in these ways.
Obviously, O’Connor can’t directly observe a counterfactual world in which individuals were perfectly rational and not subject to psychological bias. So, like us, she constructs a simple model, in which people are rational. She shows that under plausible assumptions and conditions:
A modeling perspective can show us that the conditions necessary to generate pernicious inequity in human societies are extremely minimal. Under these minimal conditions, cultural evolutionary pathways will robustly march towards inequitable systems. These models do not prove that real world systems of inequity have, in fact, evolved via these simple cultural evolutionary pathways, but they tell us that they could. In particular, they show that even if many of the most pernicious psychological facts about humans are removed or mitigated, inequitable conventions of the second sort are still expected to emerge.
In other words: we might see racial and gender bias continue at the system level (e.g. Black people and women consistently being discriminated against), even if we somehow, magically, got rid of all the psychological biases have at the individual level about Black people and women. This is a really valuable finding. Indeed, my only significant objection to O’Connor’s book is that she doesn’t make nearly as much as she might of it. Economists like Gary Becker and Milton Friedman were extremely fond of arguing that racism and sexism were irrational and would disappear if only markets were allowed to work their magic. O’Connor uses economic models to demonstrate the contrary: why racism and sexism may continue to thrive under conditions of rational exchange, and I would love it if she was just a little blunter in sticking it to the Becker/Friedman complex. Bright, Gabriel, O’Connor and Taiwo have used similar modeling techniques to build a model of enduring racial capitalism: perhaps this will provide a platform from which some lively and useful future polemic will be launched.
I’m not saying that what Cosma and I have done is nearly as valuable, but its approach is very similar. Like O’Connor, we use our model not to represent reality as it is, but to build a counterfactual, suggesting that if we had not invented the panoply of modern social media algorithms in the first place, we would likely have ended up in much the same place. This does not say that these algorithms didn’t contribute, any more than O’Connor’s arguments absolve the psychological bases of racism and sexism. It does strongly imply (assuming that our model is not utterly mistaken) that the problems would still exist even if the algorithms did not.
But like all theoretical frameworks, our counterfactual has its implied politics – and here is where I think there is scope for a more useful and specific disagreement. As mentioned, Nate links to a very new piece by Kreiss and McGregor, which argues that much of the literature on polarization is not only misconstrued but actively misleading. In their words, “Our foundational claim is that polarization might not be bad for democracy—it might in fact be a necessary outgrowth of efforts to achieve democracy.”
Kreiss and McGregor go on to detail the various ways in which the literature on polarization and platforms harks back to an imagined pre-polarization America (which enjoyed an apparent consensus only because Black people and others who disagreed were suppressed). They argue that we should pay attention to inequality rather than polarization when we look to assess the health of democracy. More bluntly: we should understand that much of today’s apparent polarization is the result of people’s efforts to redress the inequality that has been part and parcel of America’s purportedly democratic system for decades. The struggle to actively achieve American democracy inevitably involves contention – and not all sides are equal. Those who are pressing for more equality and justice – especially but not exclusively racial equality and justice – have a very different status than those who are trying to defend unjust relations. And the focus on polarization tends to push those important questions to the sidelines.
So Cosma and I largely agree both with this diagnosis of the literature and with the understanding of democracy that propels it. We don’t talk about this in the article, except indirectly in side comments – we were bounded by both sharp word count constraints and a fifteen citations limit (as an aside, we don’t just cite to “famous” Nature and Science pieces – we cite just one article from either Nature or Science and two more from the Nature/Science Extended Universe ™). We used one of our precious citations to point to a previous article where we set out our account of democracy, which (a) emphasizes that democracy involves rowdy struggle, and (b) stresses that “a commitment to democratic improvements is a commitment to making power relations more equal.” If we’d had more room (extensive self-citation is especially egregious when you’re cramped within the confines of a tiny bibliography) we’d likely have cited arguments elsewhere e.g. about the value of democratic instability in tearing up old racial and gender norms, and how “strong gatekeeping” media systems in the pre-Internet era subordinated Black voices and perpetuated myths about Black people.
In other words, our arguments start from a place that is broadly located within the equality-centric understanding of democracy that Kreiss and McGregor are looking for (of course: there may be aspects of our understanding that they and others might still very reasonably dispute). More broadly speaking, one of our major intellectual projects, with Danielle Allen is to try to build a model of democracy, explaining how its central commitment to equality provides it with dynamical advantages (this relates in important ways to the O’Connor book described earlier – it also relates in different ways to Danielle’s fantastic recent book).
All this said, our article is very explicitly a piece about polarization and democratic stability. Its underlying intuition is that if beliefs become too polarized, democracy will become unstable. And that is not an inherently stupid or biased argument. As Kreiss and McGregor summarize a broader literature:
at some fundamental level the groups that exist within a pluralistic society must accept one another as legitimate, even though they may have opposing values, interests, and ends. Groups must tolerate one another, accepting each other’s right to exist and to advance their interests in private and public spheres. This tolerance is essential given that groups often define themselves through drawing boundaries with others (Smith, 2003). It is often socially and politically powerful to create and draw hard edges around a shared identity, conjure a clear opposition, and define competing interests, especially through media spheres that support building, maintaining, and contesting political power (Squires, 2002). As such, some level of polarization is an endemic feature of social and political life. Polarization becomes problematic, however, when it is so extreme as to erode the legitimacy of opposing groups, the tolerance that democratic co-existence is premised upon and faith among partisans that the other side will continue to engage in free and fair elections (Haggard and Kaufman, 2021),
I think – though I am not entirely certain – that Kreiss and McGregor endorse this understanding. Their article is explicitly a “provocation” and a polemic against the tendencies of the polarization literature that they rightly detest. Still, they acknowledge that it only applies to “some” of the literature, that polarization can be “dangerous,” and that some share of the people who worry about polarization (including my Hopkins colleague Lily Mason) have an approach to polarization that doesn’t suffer from these flaws, and that polarization has risks too.
So what are the specific risks of the belief polarization that we talk about? Again, there’s writing elsewhere that we weren’t able to cite to, which emphasize that even under a minimalist account of democracy, we need shared (and justified) beliefs in the electoral process, and in the willingness of government parties and officials to give up office when they lose an election. That is a foundation of democratic stability, even if we embrace contention and equality as core elements of democracy.
As Kreiss and McGregor say, we should not embrace concerns about polarization “at all costs.” But we shouldn’t completely exclude these concerns either. Some opponents of polarization seem to think that to heal democracy, we all just need to start liking each other. That isn’t a particularly serious claim. But the claim that we need to figure out ways to live together in some minimal consensus, however grudging, is, I think, one that ought be taken very seriously indeed. Hence our argument, which stems from the claim that this consensus is democratically possible even under a realistic and moderately pessimistic account of human psychology (here, we implicitly push back against some prominent recent anti-democratic arguments). If those psychological microfoundations are right, we even have some general clues as to the foundations of a better and more stable democracy.
So this is the disagreement that I think is worth taking up. If Kreiss, McGregor, and for that matter Nate, don’t think that polarization is a problem at all, then it would be good to know this. But I really don’t think that they believe this. If, alternatively, they think that polarization is a problem, but one that has been misused by people who idealize a largely imaginary peaceful American past, then there isn’t any disagreement in principle between them, Cosma, and myself. Of course, there may be, and almost certainly are, practical disagreements, and articulating these disagreements and thrashing them out would be potentially very useful.
More broadly – I think we are all committed to an understanding of democracy that is both (a) more just and egalitarian, and (b) stable against urgent threats, which do include polarization. But figuring out how to reconcile justice with democratic stability is extremely difficult, both in the particular and the general. And it requires the bringing together of different kinds of knowledge. When Nate suggests that the framework that Cosma and I use is empirically unfounded, he’s wrong. We’re building on a large body of research in human psychology. But if he were to make the (mildly modified) statement that our framework is severely empirically limited, he would be absolutely right. It sketches out the landscape of one important problem, but doesn’t say much at all about how to solve it, or reconcile possible solutions with other major problems that we face. I think that the “community science” that Nate favors is one enormously important – even crucial – source of ideas about how to do this, as part of a broader “translational” approach to building democracy, which helps address the deficiencies of big theories, but this post is already very long, so I’ll leave it there.