Identity Politics isn't new, but our framing of it is.
The view of history often falls into the trope of unstoppable progress forward. President Obama often referenced being on the “right side of history” even quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in saying that the “arc of history” bends towards justice. While from a cursory glance, this view feels right, we live today in a more stable, just, and safe world than we did just a century earlier. It also lacks the perspective in how fragile progress and justice can actually be. One step forward can quite easily lead to 2, 5, or 25 steps back. If, like me, you do not believe in any form of grand overseer or director of human existence, then it is much harder to assume that human behavior marches forward to a better tomorrow.
Justice can only come through social development. Nature is not just, but people, working together, can and ought to strive towards justice amongst themselves. By this framing, justice exists along a civilization scale, the more developed a society, the more just it should be and vice versa.
History is rife with examples of societal backsliding. In Europe, the area of connectivity and political philosophy was interrupted by first the establishment of the Roman Empire and then by it’s subsequent collapse and the so-called “dark ages.” Ancient Egypt collapsed upon itself and was conquered by the Greeks. In Asia, the Chinese state has undergone long periods of renewal and collapse, including being conquered and reconfigured. In the middle east, the ancient empires of Babylon, Israel, Assyria, fell apart and were conquered by outside empires before being restored by the creation of the Islamic Caliphate, but this too would eventually splinter. In sub-saharan Africa, successive empires of Mali and Songhai had their moments only to fall into decay.
Today’s ideal form of state is representative democracy. That form itself is quite old but in its modern form, only gained global hegemony in the last 100 years. That’s a remarkably short period of time in social history. The view that representative democracy has become the defacto system of governance is shortsighted. That view not only allows people to turn a blind eye towards threats to representative democracy, it also allows for complacency in how to operate inside the system. Stable representative democracy is much harder to maintain and keep than most participants in it believe.
A stable representative democracy demands that voters, politicians, and media outlets work in concert to correct, address, or alleviate societal, systemic, or governmental inadequacies. When any element of those three distinct acting groups fail in their role, there can be a spiraling effect which not only leads to destabilization, but the polluting of democracy altogether.
When I say stable representative democracy, I mean a system in which voters, informed by a critical media, make political decisions based on what they think is best for their country, state, county, commune, municipality, province, or district. The primary political decision being to vote for a particular person, party, or slate of persons to represent that voter’s interests in various political institutions. Those elected persons or parties are then beholden to not only the voters who elected them, but oftentimes voters who chose someone else. This means that the elect must do their best to satisfy not only the constituents who directly voted for their role but also for their entire representational unit.
Managing to carefully balance personal desires and ideologies with the desires of those who put you in the office is the role of a political representative. To completely remove personal preference and become nothing more than a cypher for one’s voters would be to remove the representative from representation. A representative must see their role as filling in the gaps of public knowledge. They are elected as a means of offloading the work of political thinking and legislating from the average citizen and must therefore maintain some element of ideological and strategic autonomy.
But to run completely into one’s own desires is also a danger. The representative who, once elected, decides to operate solely on their own principles and desires risks alienating those who sent the representative to represent. These representatives should be replaced at the next opportunity, elsewise the electorate shows their own complacency or ignorance. To send a representative to represent is not to offload all thought of the political process, just as the representative must balance personal belief with voter sentiment, so too must the voter balance political thought with a willingness to let others handle the dirty work.
The voter should maintain some element of political knowledge. A voter who knows nothing of how the system operates or what they personally would like to see changed in society is a voter who can fall prey to voting against their own interests. These interests can be material, as in voting for representatives who will damage the value of your assets, raise your taxation, or remove welfare benefits. But it can also be for representatives who will do systemic harm. The former ignorant vote is much less harmful than the latter but neither suggest a healthy form of representation.
The voter requires help to maintain the necessary level of political knowledge to maintain a stable representative democracy. This is the role of the media. In a stable system the media operates as a check on the powers of the representatives for the good of the represented. It is the role of the media to investigate claims, relay accurate information, and question assumptions in order to provide voters with the best information possible to make political decisions. But the media must also balance its accumulation of facts with effective and thoughtful editorializing. It is not enough to simply compile all the information of the day, necessary decisions must be made about how to frame stories, which stories deserve highlighting, and which stories even make it into publication. This has never been easy.
The fundamental difficulty in media is financing. How a news organization makes the money necessary to operate can lead to negative behaviors which undermine stable representative democracy. If the news outlet requires money from the electorate, then it runs the risk of catering to base human emotions more than political facts or reality. This occurs not through the omission of some stories but the highlighting and editorializing of stories which evoke strong emotions. When strong emotions are evinced, the media runs the risk of overemphasizing the societal importance on any such issue. This can cause a panic among the electorate who then turn to their representatives to take strong action, even if the problem at hand is minor in scale. This in turn can lead to political overreactions which can cause greater harm than good. This is why in survey data you will often see voters think certain, emotion evoking subjects are far more widespread or magnitudinal than they actually are.
One solution to the financing difficulty for news media is to provide funding via government/public support. This allows news organizations to make decisions based on a clean editorial judgement about what voters should be hearing, seeing, or reading. But this form of financing also runs the risk of political capture. When a media organization is fully funded by political mechanisms it is then partly beholden to the very representatives and politicians it is there to hold to account. In a healthy representative democracy this is not a problem. Politicians understand the value of such an institution and remove from themselves the temptation to tamper with the news for their own gain. Yet this can be a difficult impulse to control, particularly when a politician begins to feel as though they, or their party, are being unfairly covered by the state funded media.
Perhaps the best option is a mixing of the two forms. State funded media which can maintain a high standard of information driven news alongside subscriber funded media which allows for a greater diversity of viewpoints to arise. However this form can also lead to a skewing of stability, particularly if voters begin to only trust singular news outlets. If a news outlet corners a section of the voting public, it can create the political environment it so desires. Even more so, because that outlet is funded via its subscribers, there is an incentive loop to become more extreme and more removed from common discourse.
Imbalances to the players in a stable representative democracy can happen for a variety of reasons but most of those reasons can be traced to identity. Individuals all have a multitude of identities shaped by their own decisions and by factors outside of their control (birth, geographic location, gender, sexual orientation, ect.). While identities are important to the individual, collective identities are what are important for a stable representative democracy. In order for a stable representative democracy to work, the voters, media, and politicians must share certain shared identities. That shared identity has often been based on a national identity. As citizens of X we all must work together for our shared nation.
When particular identities begin to outweigh the overall collective shared identity, this can lead to destabilization of a representative democracy. This can be fictive or factual. If a smaller collective identity comes to see themselves as under threat by the broader sweep of political activity, that identity will supersede the overall collective identity because its members will feel that their threatened identity is in need of protection. When this occurs, a breakdown of the balance of representation is possible. This means that a stable representative democracy must also operate in a way which balances the interests of smaller group identities with each other, never allowing identities to feel overly threatened or discriminated against.
Identity must be regulated by all three primary actors. The voter should do their best to maintain their collected identities in balance with one another and attempt to keep the largest shared identities as primary. As long as the largest shared identity remains hegemon in the eyes of the voter then a stable representative democracy is possible. This is obviously harder said than done. Oftentimes the voter can be pushed to view one of their smaller identities to the forefront, beyond the collective shared identity because they feel their smaller identity is causing them to be viewed differently, treated differently, or discriminated against by the state which immediately removes the primacy of the collective shared identity.
This is why it is so important that political actors do their part to maintain the hegemony of the shared collective identity. Enacting laws which affect smaller identity groups, or even worse, using the language of the shared collective identity to place some members of society outside of that group are destabilizing behaviors. When a politician invokes the line that something is “un-X” they should do so with extreme caution as it may make individuals come to see their subordinate identities as being more important than the collective shared identity. To tell someone that their smaller identity does not comport with the shared collective identity can make them believe it to be the case.
The media must do their best to center the collective shared identity above other group identities while also doing its best to recognize when those other group identities are being treated unfairly via the political process. This is a difficult line to balance on. From one perspective, overemphasis of the collective shared identity can be seen as erasing the concerns of smaller group identities. From the other perspective, the emphasis on political disadvantages to smaller group identities can run the risk of driving further wedges into a fractured society.
The destabilization of collective shared identity is the greatest threat to a stable representative democracy because it allows members of the system to stop caring about the outcomes of elections, the maintenance of norms, and the wellbeing of their neighbors. States that have never had a stable representative democracy almost universally have no shared collective identity. These are often states that were not made through their own volition but by the maneuvering of foreign states through war, colonialism, or imperialism. Because disparate peoples find themselves inside a state created by outside forces, they have never built their own shared collective identity and crafting such an identity post-factum is exceptionally rare and difficult. This is why states with stable representative democracies and shared collective identities must fight so hard to maintain those shared identities, because once lost they can be impossible to rebuild.
The present day backsliding of democracy can be pinned to a number of different factors. However, I believe the defining factor is the diminishment of the shared collective identity. It is not because the rise of smaller group identities has necessarily pushed out the shared collective identity, but rather that societies have done a poor job of balancing the safety of smaller group identities and making sure they do not supersede the shared collective identity.
When a voter makes their decisions based solely on the position of a smaller group identity, they are neglecting the shared identity necessary for the stable representation. When politicians make laws which discriminate, or fail to repeal laws which discriminate against smaller group identities they help to strengthen those identities at the cost of the shared collective identity. When politicians steal the shared collective identity for their own ideological persuasion, they bastardize the concept of a shared identity. When the media stokes fear of particular smaller group identities they distract from the shared collective identity. When the media overvalues the experience of one smaller group identity they erase the importance of the shared collective identity.
A shared collective identity is necessary for the maintenance of stable representative democracy. A shared collective identity is hard to maintain, even harder to create, and nearly impossible to resurrect once dead. Stable representative democracies cooperate better than unstable democracies or autocracies which allows for the establishment of greater collective identities than just national identities. However imbalances in the three actors of stable representative democracies can lead to a fracturing or breaking of shared collective identities. Whether struggling democracies today can regain their foothold on shared collective identities remains to be seen. I believe it’s our only hope to make the 20 century expansion of democracy the continuation of the long arch of history towards justice and not just an aberration.
