Professor Steven Livingston of George Washington University writes here about connections between the spread of disinformation, the rise of populism in Europe and the US, and the lack of trust in institutions fuelled by the inequality and the far-right.
A recent analysis of 31 European countries found that almost a third of Europeans now vote for anti-establishment populist parties, the majority of which are on the far-right. The situation in Britain is, according to political scientist Cas Mudde, in some ways similar, although rather than an ascendent radical right party, it is the Conservative Party that is mainstreaming extremist ideas. The situation in the United States is perhaps even more pessimistic: not only is the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination Donald Trump saddled with 91 criminal indictments, he and many of his fellow Republicans exhibit open contempt for American political norms and institutions, including the mainstream media. And many Americans share his views. For instance, polling in 2023 found that 50% of Americans believe that most national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public (emphasis added). Meanwhile, the percentage of people reporting a great deal or quite a lot of trust in newspapers has declined precipitously in the US over the last half-century: from just under 40% in 1973 to 16% by 2022.
What explains this decline of trust and the growing embrace of right-wing parties and politicians?
One explanation points to social media and the propensities of the human brain. Political scientists like Lilliana Mason attribute growing distrust and polarization to social identity formation trends that erode heterogeneous group affiliations. Those who are part of heterogeneous social groupings are less likely to get caught up in all-or-nothing party competition. On the other hand, “those with highly aligned religious, racial, and partisan identities are less prepared to engage (cordially) with their partisan opponents”. As one’s affective affiliations become more homogeneous, a process facilitated by social media recommendation algorithms, one develops deeper social attachments to shared group characteristics, what she calls social sorting. Social sorting undermines policy sorting – the sort of political identity established according to rationally understood issue positions. Growing irrational partisanship robs democracies of their chance at compromise from a set of common beliefs.
An alternative take on the question of declining trust in institutions looks to history and social conditions for clues. While agreeing with much of the above description of the current state of distrust and polarization present in contemporary society, some scholars disagree with the assertion that some sort of “lost opportunity for compromise” exists if only citizens were somehow made more rational. In the United States, partisanship has nearly always been defined by race, class, religious, and regional differences. Daniel Kreiss and Shannon C. McGregor, for example, note that the mainstream political science/political communication understanding of polarization is essentially ahistorical and indifferent to unjust social and economic conditions. To assert that race, class, and religion are alien contaminants to an otherwise fair and just social system is to misread history and ignore contemporary social conditions.
Indeed, political partisanship in the US has almost always been about race. The Republican Party (GOP) emerged from a split within the Whig Party over the question of slavery. And for decades after the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction, the Democrats were aligned with White Supremacy and Segregationist Jim Crow Laws of the southern Confederacy — until the 1960s Civil Rights Movement when parties realigned along racial cleavages. As Robert P. Jones has cogently argued, southern Evangelical Protestantism after the Civil War institutionalized “Lost Cause” white supremacy. More recently, white Christian nationalism is doing the same with normative claims concerning gender identity and the separation of church and state. And while it must be kept in mind that race and class are overlapping categories, a similar story can be told of class differences in the US. For generations, the Republicans have been closely aligned with big business while New Deal Democrats were aligned with the working and middle classes. The legacy of the GOP’s embrace of neoliberalism since Reagan — and the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism-lite under Clinton and Obama — imbues all aspects of partisan identity in the United States.
A lack of social harmony
A cursory glance at wealth disparities in the US calls into question narratives which imply that there is a lost underlying social harmony just waiting to be discovered with the right kind of information. In 2022, three people owned more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. By 2019, the compensation given to CEOs of large corporations had grown by 940% since 1978. In that same time period, worker compensation grew by only 12%, even while productivity skyrocketed. From 1975 to 2018, roughly the years encompassing the rise of neoliberalism, approximately $47 trillion in wealth was transferred upward to the richest Americans. What is more, during the first two years of the Coronavirus pandemic, about $42 trillion in new wealth was created. Approximately two-thirds of it went to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population. Meanwhile, nearly half of Americans cannot afford an unexpected $400 expense and somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 Americans are homeless. Many others cling precariously to their homes, with nearly 18 million households in the US spending about 50 percent or more of their incomes on housing. These conditions are responsible, argue Anne Case and Agnus Deaton, for deaths of despair, their term for the disproportionate mortality rates of middle-aged citizens without a college degree.
The Disinformation Age
My colleague Lance Bennett and I argue in our 2020 book that the current “disinformation age” is in the US the consequence not only of social media and the far-right information environment, but also because of decades of sustained attack on authoritative institutions (science, mainstream journalism, academia, the administrative state) by billionaires backing an extremist libertarian movement that sought to shape state/market relations on its own favorable terms. To realize these objectives, billions of dollars were and are spent to establish and expand a broad array of think tanks, university research centers, and faux grassroots organizations. Their sole purpose is to undermine the legitimacy and credibility of science that underscores the need for regulation of industry and progressive taxation of concentrated wealth. Meanwhile, US tax laws shielded the identities of billionaires and corporations donating billions of dollars to these “non-profit” organizations. The amount and reach of “dark money” spent to manipulate legislation and policy outcomes on behalf of wealthy elites, irrespective of public preferences, has undermined public trust in both US parties and in mainstream institutions. Case and Deaton write that in 2016, the year of Donald Trump’s narrow Electoral College victory, “more than two-thirds of white working-class Americans believed that elections were controlled by the rich and by big corporations.” They also note that “working class whites do not believe that democracy can help them” . As Benjamin Page and his colleagues note, these are not irrational beliefs. Instead, they could just as well be regarded as accurate assessments of power structures and current social and economic conditions.
In this light, substantive solutions are not found in measures intended to tweak the quality of information in a way that would reveal a latent consensus. Media literacy programs or fact checking will not address the underlying causes of social discord and distrust. At least not alone. It requires a rebuilding of social bonds and communities out of the rubble of what Wendy Brown calls “the ruins of neoliberalism.” The first step requires an accurate diagnosis of the problem.
This post represents the views of the author and not the position of the Media@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Featured image: Photo by Kayla Velasquez on Unsplash
