12- Constitutional Revival: Information
Democracy is unsustainable without a shared reality
This is the twelfth in a series of occasional posts about rebuilding democracy after Trump. You can read an overview of the series here.
On January 6, 2021, supporters of Donald Trump attacked the Capitol to halt the counting of electoral votes that would have certified Joe Biden as the rightful winner of the 2020 election.
Or maybe they didn’t.
Maybe they were peaceful tourists. Maybe it was a day of love. Maybe Biden didn’t win the election at all.
These false claims have all been amplified by right-wing media. And our media environment is so fragmented that you can get all your information from news sources or influencers who promote their own reality.
This is no way to run a democracy.
In fact, it may make democracy impossible.
For all the reforms we’ve discussed in this series, a functioning democracy may remain elusive unless we break out of our information silos.
And I have to admit that I don’t know of an easy way to make that happen.
In the days before AI, social media, and online connectivity, there were limits to the information we could get and—perhaps more significantly—to the number of gatekeepers who decided what that information would be.
When most people got their information from television, radio and newspapers, a handful of editors and producers determined the content of news reports, and a few executives decided when we would get to see it. This small group of elite decision-makers applying a shared set of news judgments that produced overlapping content provided a common basis for our understanding of what was happening in the world.
There would be network evening news broadcasts around dinnertime, local television news broadcasts following prime time, morning or evening newspapers, a few national news magazines, and in some places 24-hour radio news broadcasts. In time, cable news would add around-the-clock options and home recording devices would give viewers some scheduling flexibility, but the basic top-down dynamic remained the same.
And because the airwaves are a public resource, the Federal Communications Commission could regulate content to ensure that it was in the public interest. The Fairness Doctrine, which was in place through the late 1980s, required broadcast licensees to present competing views on important issues as a public service to the audience.
There were drawbacks to having a small elite set the news agenda, not the least being that it would reflect their agenda—the things they found most significant, interesting, or marketable—at the expense of what a broader range of people with different political or social views might put before the public. We all got the same news from the same perspective.
But that sameness provided a frame of reference that served to keep everyone tethered to a common set of facts. Media gatekeepers were attuned to protecting the integrity of the information they disseminated. And they lived in a factual world.
That world is gone.
It started fading with the rise of the blogosphere at the turn of the century and evaporated with the advent of social media. Not only are there an incalculable number of information sources today, the barriers to becoming a gatekeeper are so low as to be nonexistent.
I’m a gatekeeper on this Substack, which is but one small star in a constellation of information sources competing for your attention. With access to social media, you can be a gatekeeper too.
Anyone can. People who were once stuck in their basements ranting to a handful of friends can become influencers with millions of followers.
But as the ability to disseminate content has democratized, content itself has become fragmented. Without controls, people can and will say anything they want. If you can attract an audience by making outrageously false claims that people will think are true, then you can influence how they experience the world.
Even without foreign actors and huge corporate interests working the chaos to their advantage, this setup is ideal for pulling us apart.
Good information widely shared should be a foundational requirement for a healthy democratic society.
From that perspective, we’ve got a problem.
Unfortunately, it’s not a problem we can fix quickly or easily.
Solutions that may have worked in the old media environment are much harder to apply today. The impetus behind the Fairness Doctrine was to provide a balanced treatment of public issues, and there have been efforts to reintroduce it as recently as a few years ago (ironically, that effort was spearheaded by Tulsi Gabbard).
Even if you could bring back standards for reporting news in the public interest, tailoring them to our fragmented, decentralized information bazaar would be orders of magnitude more challenging than what the FCC faced when it was dealing with three television networks. And protecting free expression in the pursuit of maintaining good information potentially puts a foundational right at odds with a democratic essential.
But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Good information reliably communicated is a cornerstone of effective governance.
So is the ability to process information. So is having a fundamental understanding of how government works.
On that score, there may be something we can do quickly to make politics feel a bit less overwhelming. There may be a way to help people develop the tools to wade through our confusing news environment and make better political choices for themselves.
Civics.
Understanding government and our role as citizens.
A bipartisan group of senators led by Democrat Chris Coons and Republican John Cornyn have sponsored the Civics Secures Democracy Act, which would pump $1 billion federal dollars annually to state education agencies and nonprofit organizations to support the teaching of civics in public schools.
The funds would be used to enhance the teaching of civics, develop evidence-based civics curricula, prepare educators to teach civics, assess the effectiveness of elementary and secondary school civics programs, and reward outstanding civics teachers from underrepresented communities.
The goals:
To tackle polarization and mistrust in political institutions by making government meaningful, accessible, and understandable.
To create more aware and capable citizens.
To teach skills that will result in more effective participation.
Or, as the nonprofit organization iCivics puts it, “the best way to strengthen democracy is to teach it.”
I think that’s right.
And in the process, we can impart the tools necessary for making good political decisions, like critical thinking skills and elevated political awareness.
We can engage generations of citizens by making government familiar and easier to access.
Civic education will not clean up the confounding news environment that confronts us every day—and it shouldn’t be a replacement for trying—but it can help young people figure out how to distinguish good information from misinformation and disinformation.
Democracy becomes easier to sustain as more people understand the fundamentals of government, recognize how it affects them, and figure out where they fit in the process.
Remember, Donald Trump has openly embraced poorly educated Americans. He does not want you to think for yourself.
Do we need a better reason to make sure people do?
For all the institutional changes that will help us reclaim democracy, perhaps none is as important as civic education.
We can bring the Court back into balance.
We can draw fair districts.
We can reform the filibuster.
We can recalibrate campaign finance laws.
We can make voting easier.
We can do these things. We must do these things.
But when we do, our nation will still only be as strong as the people entrusted to make decisions for themselves.
We have to empower ourselves and our neighbors to make good decisions. To make informed decisions. To make decisions that will serve our interests.
Because this is how democracy works.
This is how democracy is supposed to work.
Democracy is not and never has been a spectator sport. It is the sum total of the collective choices we make.
We need to be able to make those choices well.
UP NEXT: How to build a mandate for action.
Matt, thank you for this brilliantly insightful piece. I’d like to add that we should not limit civics education to children in schools. Think of how many adults in political office today, including our so-called president (“I can do whatever I want”), who do not have a basic understanding of how our government works or what the Constitution says. Maybe anyone intending to run for any elected office should be required to pass a basic civics exam. Maybe simple, clear take-home civics booklets could be made available free at public libraries, etc. I’m advocating for remedial civics education for adults. Not sure exactly what forms this could take but I believe it is a worthy concept that aligns with yours.
Matt:
It's not sufficient to say that we are going to teach "civics". At the root of our problems is a failure to teach critical thinking and information literacy, stemming from Bush's "No Child Left Behind" propaganda campaign. We see this play out in the voters who vote against their own interests, and in those who believe that all education should only be vocational.
We now have a couple of generations of Americans who do not know history (and are easily fooled by whitewashed versions and the mythology of the Lost Cause), who do not understand economics (and are misled into thinking that expensive eggs are the fault of the President, rather than monopolistic practices of industrial farming corporations), and who are incapable of discerning outright lies that contradict what they saw happen, live and in color, such as a gallows erected on the Capitol grounds with which to hang a sitting Vice President.)
There are no easy solutions to this situation, but the band-aid of trying to teach "civics" to today's students is, as the comedian David Steinberg once said, "Like trying to explain alternate side of the street parking to a cranberry."