We have arrived in the twenty-first century to a world in which democracy has been threatened in the very nation that regards itself as her beacon. Medieval-like conspiracy theories of Satanic rituals and lizards hiding under human form have taken hold in some of the most advanced countries in the world. This is certainly not what was envisioned by the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, the futurists of the twentieth century. How can we make sense of all this? How did we get here?
At the very least, if we were not aware of it before, we should have learned by now that history does not soar upward in a straight arrow toward liberty, reason, and freedom. Nor does it repeat itself. It is neither linear, nor circular. Perhaps it is better understood as a wobbly spherical ellipsis of sorts. As the dictum goes, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhythm. The Gilded Age certainly does rhythm with today’s Digital Age. Like our own moment in history, it was a period dominated by the ideal of individualism, colored by an almost religious belief in the power of markets, and marked by the rise of a small group of super-rich entrepreneurs and bankers. It was also an era of profound incongruities. On one side, there was the liberal triumph of women’s enfranchisement, remarkable strides in fighting disease, and the miraculous introduction of the electric light, the phonograph, and the telephone. On the other side, the working poor were left to suffer in “the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most of enforced idleness.”1
The numerous parallels with our own times suggest that using such a historical comparison can provide insight into how we got to where we are and, perhaps, even offer a glimpse of what is to come. Yet, there are such dramatic differences between the periods being compared. Given that this is so, to what extent can history be a guide?
Arguably, there are some valuable lessons from the previous century that can direct our thinking about the future. One such lesson is offered by parallels in the evolution of mass media in both eras. At the last turn of the century, for the first time in history, new forms of communication and transportation created the possibility of disseminating news to a mass audience. The Broadsheet and Penny Newspaper were to the Gilded Age what the Internet and social media are to the Digital Age. At first, this led to a race to the bottom. Sensationalism sold copy. But Yellow Journalism did come to an end. Change began with campaigns against the printing of dangerous advertisements made by “nostrum manufacturers” that falsely claimed their products were “medicinal” cures. The newspapers for a long time were able to hide behind a caveat emptor policy, claiming that it was the responsibility of news readers to determine the veracity of advertisements, not the news publishers. In response, independent journalists, called “muckrakers,” put unceasing pressure on the news industry to adopt an ethical posture. At the same time, the large news outlets were becoming dependent upon advertising dollars to stay in print. The industry began to recognize both the importance of fostering a politically heterogeneous readership and protecting itself from potential legal sanctions. Newspapers began to police themselves. “Objectivity and professionalism became a buffer, helping commercial newspaper companies stake a claim to their legitimacy as they monopolized local markets and as daily newspapers not owned by wealthy individuals or corporations began to disappear.”2 By 1923, the American Society of News Editors issued its “Canons of Ethics,” the first standards for ethics in journalism. This was the beginning of responsible journalism.
We may be undergoing a similar process today. In June 2020, increasing public disaffection with Facebook’s handling of hate speech and misinformation prompted large corporate advertisers, like Coca-Cola, Verizon, Levi Strauss, and Unilever, to threaten to pause advertising on the social network. The heat was also felt by Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. Social media platforms began to take action. Some accounts were taken down. Some warning messages were put up. Thus, public discontent influenced powerful advertisers to push these large tech giants to start policing themselves. The momentum increased after the January 2021 storming of the Capitol in the United States. Facebook, Twitter, and others banned Donald Trump from using their platforms. Like the American Society of News Editors who banded together to develop standards for ethical journalism, Facebook launched its own Oversight Board. Designed to be independent, the board was tasked with developing a set of policies and principles to govern decisions on digital content and the company’s governance. It therefore appears that we may be moving toward a new era of media control in which freedom of speech will be better balanced against the need to protect society from dangerous, incendiary rhetoric. As in the last century, it is likely that the media’s self-policing will not be enough. We will probably need to develop a new legal structure to address the communications world of today. But looking to history does offer a hint of how that might come to pass.
That said, there are also critical differences between the two eras. In the early twentieth century, the tragedy of World War I and the severity of the Great Depression wreaked havoc across Europe and the United States. Although the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the oil crisis set off by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have undermined sociopolitical structures and national economies, the suffering experienced in Europe and America during the first decades of the twentieth century was arguably on a whole order of magnitude more intense than the displacements experienced across the developed world in the early 2020s (with the exception of Ukraine). Additionally, as polarized as we are in the developed world, we are nowhere near as divided as the advanced nations were in the 1910s and 1920s when communists and fascists faced off against one another. Although alt-right movements of today strongly resemble the fascist movements of yesteryear, communism remains a discredited alternative. As much as conservatives might try to paint social welfare policies as communist, they are not. Thus, the poles themselves are not as dichotomous.
Another crucial difference is that democratic institutions are more deeply rooted than they were at the naissance of the last century. With the exceptions of Britain and the United States, modern democratic systems in the early twentieth century had either not yet been instituted or were quite new and fragile. Even though we have seen the radical right make steady gains across Western Europe and the United States, those gains have continued to be reined in by liberal political institutions. It is true the United States has faced serious threats to her democratic system and witnessed the undoing of liberal social policies once thought sacrosanct. Yet, the political system has, thus far, been able to hold the most serious of these anti-democratic forces at bay. Where fascism has been able to take greater hold, democracy is as new and vulnerable as it was in Western Europe at the turn of the century. Countries in the former Eastern bloc, such as Hungary, Poland and Russia, have gone the furthest in rolling back democratic reforms.
Moreover, unlike people living a century ago, we have a recorded history of the tragic effects of fascism and communism. Presumably, more people are concerned to guard against such occurrences than were at the turn of the nineteenth century. Evidence of this is that by spring of 2021, much of the hot air had gone out of several white supremacist/neo-fascist movements. The leaders of the Golden Dawn in Greece were behind bars. The website of the British National Front had been permanently removed. Even Donald Trump had been banned from Facebook. There are therefore indications that we could be moving away from the worst outcomes of the last century.
Also, the world is far more urban and mobile than it was one hundred years ago. Across advanced economies, urban areas have consistently been more liberal and tolerant and supportive of the kind of social welfare systems that so effectively stabilized the world economy after World War II. All these factors combined could provide the space for a new “Bretton Woods compromise.” The double movement of today could well produce a new form of “embedded liberalism,” in which national economic sovereignty would be better balanced against global finance, and political freedoms would coexist with greater social protections.
On the other hand, there are many disconcerting differences. Although the falsities of the period of Yellow Journalism have strong parallels to our era of “post-truth,” today’s fake news is arguably more pernicious. This is, in part, because the speed with which disinformation can be spread has been amplified by modern technologies. Emotionally charged posts, with carefully chosen words and images, can be quickly passed along social media platforms by trusted friends. In this way, social networks spread dangerously false content across the Internet at lightning speed. Equally worrying is the fact that information is not dispersed evenly. The algorithms that media platforms have developed to personalize information for individuals has meant that like groups see the same things, but unalike groups do not. As a result, even when a controversial claim can be adequately “fact-checked,” it may have already sowed so much outrage or confusion that any appeal to facts is rendered ineffectual. Even more disconcerting is that the motivation of bad actors on the Internet is less to spread propaganda or even misinformation, as much as to create a “topsy-turvy, disorienting reality” in which “fake news mislabels real news as fake,” so that “truth feels unknowable.”3 These effects are accentuated by the fact that media platforms use “proprietary ‘black box’ technologies, including opaque filtering, ranking, and recommendation algorithms, [that] mediate access to information,” and which undermine “organizational credibility and reputational trust.”4 In this way, social networks have produced information silos that divide populations, leaving little possibility for consensus and undermining democratic processes.
Indeed, our established democracies do not seem to be as immune to authoritarianism as we once presumed them to be. Liberal values can no longer be taken for granted. In one country after another, the center has been hollowed out, democratic institutions have come under fire, and right-wing populists and demagogues still hold sway over significant portions of the population. Donald Trump’s presidency revealed how vulnerable even a seemingly well-established democracy can be. So many tacit norms were violated that had never been questioned. Liberal democratic governments are vulnerable precisely because they play by the rules and respect conventional codes of behavior and decorum. But outsider populists may not. Trump was able to work within the letter of the law to bend the laws and undermine the republican structure of the government. It is possible that a future political leader could take things even further.
Across Europe and the United States, radical white-nationalist organizations, with strong ties to the military and security forces, have been coordinating and sharing tactics. In the United States, various militia groups have been stockpiling weapons for decades hoping to initiate a great “Race War.” In Germany, neo-Nazi movements, with ties to groups in Switzerland and Austria, have been strengthening since 2015 and preparing for the moment when the democratic order falls and their forces can march in and assume power—what they refer to as “Day X.”5 This may sound like disillusioned posturing, but the threat should not be dismissed. In December of 2022, twenty-five people were arrested for plotting to storm the German Capitol, arrest lawmakers, execute the chancellor, and place a man descended from German nobility as the head of state. A member of the intelligence oversight committee in the German parliament explained to the New York Times that, “This is not the first case of a cell like this planning for Day X.” Adding that, “The number of these cases are piling up and the question is to what extent are they connected.”6 And it is not just Germany. In 2021, the Italian police foiled an extremist right-wing plot to bomb a NATO military base.7 Even the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service reported in 2021 that right-wing extremist groups posed a growing danger to national security.8
There are ominous international signs as well. Over the past couple of decades, the balance of power among the global titans has become more precarious. The rise of China and Russia has eaten away at the unipolar order established after the fall of the Soviet Union. As before World War I, competing powers are increasingly vying against one another for regional control and world influence. Distrust of international fora has further weakened the foundations of an already shaky international order. Indeed, a hallmark of defensive nationalism—the combination of distrust of globalism and the move toward protectionism—is increased bellicosity. It may be that we are at the end of our cycle of one-hundred-years-peace that commenced with the Paris Peace Conference. Political spheres of influence established in the 1940s seem to be fraying at their outer limits. Ukraine, Taiwan, islands in the South China seas, and even the airspace above North Korea have become potential flash points that could set off some kind of international conflagration. What that would look like and how it would manifest remains unclear, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 might indeed be a foreshadowing of things to come.
For these reasons, it is worth remembering the sobering example of Sir Ralph Norman Angell, turn-of-the-century lecturer, journalist, and Member of British Parliament. In his book The Great Illusion, published in 1910, Angell argued that industrialized countries had become so economically intertwined that a European war had become highly unlikely. Angell boldly proclaimed in his prologue that “society is classifying itself by [economic] interests rather than by State divisions; that the modern State is losing its homogeneity; and that all these multiple factors are making rapidly for the disappearances of State rivalries.”9 Angell’s assurances of the power of economic interests to steady the international arena were published only four years before the outbreak of World War I! Angell is now best known for these sanguine liberal assumptions on the eve of mass destruction.
In contrast to Angell’s optimistic prognosis, a contemporary of his, S .H. Swinny, proved to be much more prescient:
Modern science, if it is the great bond of human unity, the destroyer of old divisions and animosities, the necessary basis of a human ethnic common to all peoples, is also a powerful weapon of destruction and exploitation. Unenlightened sentiment may easily be turned to evil, the spread of civilization or the protection of the weak becoming the cloak of many crimes. What could be a more dangerous situation than that in which a body of men, with large interests in the exploitation of a backward people or their land, and with the means of enlisting capable advocates in the Press, can persuade their fellow countrymen that the prosperity and power of their own country, and the happiness and progress of the weaker race, will both be enhanced by a policy of aggression?10
It is unclear which of these worlds we are closer to today—Angell’s ruled by a liberal ethos, or Swinny’s led by unenlightened sentiment. It is even less clear in which world we will be tomorrow. What we do know, however, is that history does rhythm, and that the cacophonous sounds of defensive nationalism can produce atonal, chaotic noise that can undermine world harmony and liberal democracies. It would therefore be wise to remain ever vigilant.