The internet, aided by the passage of time, is fuelling an alarming decline in support for democracy, warns author Anne Applebaum
The late 19th century was the era when, in the United States, the West — the Western states of today’s continental U.S. — “was won.” You all know the images — cowboys, steam locomotives belching thick black coal smoke, gold rushes. Perhaps future historians will look back at this moment in history as when the West, this time meaning the Western world, was lost. And the defining image of that may well be a smartphone.
“Surveys are showing that in the Western world — the United States, Western Europe, the proponents of the liberal democratic world — the younger people are far less likely than their parents are, to say that living in a democracy is essential.” She adds, “This is the decline in support for, and belief in and admiration for, democracy.”
People are shaping their own views, of course, in their media and social media echo chambers, via an astonishing amount of information delivered at lightspeed over the now utterly ubiquitous smartphone. Traditional institutions, media, governmental and societal, have simply been bypassed or overwhelmed, if not rendered obsolete entirely. “Political parties used to be based on real-life institutions,” she said, citing labour unions and the church as two examples.
“This is one of the things that Mueller’s report confirmed,” she noted, “and everybody now seems to accept it, even though they denied it two years ago. There is no question anymore: Russia sought to influence the U.S. election, both through cyber hacking and through social media influencer campaigns.” This, she says, has happened across Europe, including in the Brexit referendum. “This is not a kind of mystical conspiracy now. This is pretty open.
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