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Democracy may have a new enemy: Social media
If democracy can suffer setbacks in the US, where systemic guardrails are relatively strong, the chances of it deteriorating in less privileged areas are certainly greater.
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (left) and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg attend a town hall meeting at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 27, 2015. (AFP/Susana Bates)
D
espite what Hegel, Marx and Samuel Huntington have said, history doesn’t move in a straight line, and in our journey forward there are bound to be detours, setbacks and, in the case of democracy, backsliding.
Yet not so long ago, many people believed – with Huntington as the chief proponent – in a supposed teleological certainty: that democracy would win the day and history would come to an end.
The conventional wisdom was that once a society grew a significant middle class and reached a certain economic threshold, democracy would be safe and secure.
This idea was informed by thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville, who firmly believed, while writing in the 19th century, that United States-style democracy was here to stay, thanks to the underlying power of the idea of human equality, which had been gaining ground for the previous 800 years.
But as think tank International IDEA found in its latest survey of the state of global democracy, the power of ideas has not saved US democracy from backsliding.
"This year we coded the United States as backsliding for the first time, but our data suggest that the backsliding episode began at least in 2019 […] A historic turning point came in 2020-21 when former president Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election results in the United States," the group wrote in a report titled Global State of Democracy 2021.
And if democracy could suffer setbacks in the US, where systemic guardrails were relatively strong, the chances of it deteriorating in less privileged areas are certainly greater.
