DEMOCRACY ON THE EDGE
What’s alarming today is that even in democracies where leaders can be held to account, being caught out lying in high office is rarely punished. We don’t seem to care
A friend’s mother has disappeared down a conspiracy theory ‘rabbit hole’. She fears she will lose her family as they, one by one, submit themselves to the vaccine against Covid-19, a covert vehicle for a microchip which will take over their minds.
There is no arguing with her. What she believes will happen is the stuff of nightmares but is backed up by what she’s seeing online on her mobile phone. She sends my friend the proof. YouTube video links. Several times a day. There is so much supporting evidence. So much information. How can it not be true? Her Facebook friends believe her. They don’t think she’s crazy. Why won’t her family listen? Why are they letting themselves be led over a precipice? It’s unbearable.
This is a domestic crisis from the North of England. But it points to a worldwide phenomenon, a ‘reality rift’, a fragmenting of discourse into totally distinct ‘information universes’ occurring in families and communities from Brazil to India, France to the Philippines. And perhaps most dramatically in the United States.
As I write, 64 per cent of the 74 million people who voted for Donald Trump are reported to still believe his assertion, against all evidence and after 50 failed lawsuits, that he won the 2020 presidential election. That Joe Biden, with his 81 million votes, the electoral college and majorities in both Senate and Congress, ‘stole’ it.1
Even Republican congress members, 147 of them, just hours after the deadly storming of Congress by a Trump-pumped-up mob, were sticking to the storyline and refusing to certify election results. Days later, angry and aggrieved supporters would be sharing information that actually the assault on the Capitol was orchestrated by the ‘deep state, the FBI and CIA’.
Democracy is all about diversity, differing opinions and perspectives. But there has to be a shared common ground based in reality, in broad terms,
