What's at stake: The moral politics of rationalist democracy.

The choice we were facing in the United States presidential and down-ballot election was a choice between epistemes. The choice is binary because the US is home to a two-party electoral system (against its founders’ wishes, Bimber 2003). The choice is epistemic because over the course of the past several decades the US Republican Party has been shaping itself toward the logical end of their “conservative” platform. This has been several decades of attempting to dismantle public education, to assure people that “small government” equals “freedom”, to assure large corporations that they will not be held to any requirement to pay fair wages or limit CEO salaries, and to take away FCC requirements for the airing of information and requirements of specific qualifications for acting as a “news provider”. It has more recently led to governmental refusal to legislate on social media operations, it has over the course of time allowed religion to involve itself in politics more and more, and it has more generally deregulated our rights-based Constitutional framework. This “rightward pull” of US and many other nations’ politics during this time period has gutted the middle class and enhanced socioeconomic inequalities. An enhanced focus on “freedom from” government intervention (as opposed to a “freedom to”, say, live with equal treatment to others and receive reliable information) in most spaces of national life has opened up a wide gap for faux-libertarian white supremacy to regain its footing as a valid “ocular lens” (Green 2009) through which one might view the world if so inclined.

The widespread dissemination of White supremacist viewpoints, frequently couched in theocratic evangelist Christian arguments, is not new to this deregulated era.

The widespread dissemination of white supremacist viewpoints, frequently couched in theocratic evangelical Christian arguments, is not new to this deregulated era. Technological innovations over long periods of time throughout the history of modern nation-states have generated opportunities for the dissemination of such anti-democratic, white supremacist, theocratic voices while simultaneously centralizing secularized, “scientistic”, democratic information with each increase in ability to reach mass, national audiences (Bimber 2003).

Enlightenment as epistemological framework

While such centralized voices have most certainly long fallen short of representing the diversity of voices and life experiences present in the US, they have served, if only aspirationally, to create a singular notion of a “public sphere” that was founded on a common epistemological framework. That framework relied upon the US Constitution and general Enlightenment principles that called for secularized government and deified science over religion; required evidence-based governance; and privileged individual rights framed as rights to and rights from. These have been rights to this type of governance and knowledge structure and rights to be free from punishment for speaking out against this system; rights to be free from a government and mass mediated sources that would peddle lies over evidence-based information; rights to be free to be treated as equal under the law and be free from discrimination by law enforcement officers; and so on.

This aspirational epistemological framework could be described otherwise: it is a moral-political orientation (cf. Zentz 2021). A moral-political orientation is basically a set of principles that guide one’s understanding of their existence within a political world (which is every world available in human life — this is to say: all human worlds are political worlds). A political system works when a vast majority of people living within that system agree to a specific moral-political framework. To do so, they need not share a religion; nor a culture; nor a specific child-rearing practice; in short, they don’t have to have a lot in common. But they do have to share an agreement on a specific informational order that is motivated by their shared moral-political framework. In the US, this moral-political framework has aspired to what I have described above: principles — produced during the Enlightenment period — that evidence should guide our decision making, that scientific reasoning and the provision of scientific evidence should be made available to all; that scientists — people who devote their lives day in and day out to the pursuit of knowledge and truth, should be treated as authorities in their fields of expertise; that policy makers should consult scientists for guidance on how to enable these principles to hold through actual policy decisions; and that universal education should spread these principles. Knowledge is created in “temples to science/knowledge” — our universities — and it is simplified and broken up into small pieces as digestible information to children as they become the adults who will sustain the nation and sustain these guiding moral-political principles.

This is the epistemic foundation for our nation. It leaves all sorts of room for difference; it acknowledges our flaws and our principle of shared aspiration to form a “more perfect Union” with every generation; and it acknowledges that when one person is not free, nobody’s freedoms (both “freedoms to” and “freedoms from”) can be guaranteed. This is the principle of equality for all (again, aspirational as it might be).

The attack on Enlightenment 

To return to my introduction, this whole structure has been chiseled away for the last several decades. Economic policies have exacerbated inequalities; the middle classes have been gutted by laws that have ensured no corporation need be responsible for paying their employees fair wages; school funding bases have been attached to neighborhood wealth; politicians have furthered such unequal funding bases by funneling government funds to private and home schooling practices that are barely beholden to these general principles of evidence-based knowledge and democratic norms; politicians have spent excessive time sowing distrust in science and “intellectuals”; our federal legislators have refused to legislate on profit-driven social media companies who have privileged attention models over the attenuation of dis- and misinformation that has frequently been driven by non-democratic principles; and our federal communications policies have been stripped away, allowing, among many things, a stripping away of the standards of journalism in the interest of for-profit models that have brought sensationalism and no commitment to democratic norms from “journalistic entrepreneurs” who wield influence over increasingly empowered segments of the population.

This has left us with a political and informational environment in which citizens ascribe by choice to the moral-political principles that this nation was founded on. We can simply choose, therefore, to seek information that is built upon this same political framework. We can choose to care about evidence, factuality, the pursuit of truth, the dissemination of knowledge that is created through this lens, the creation of an environment in which my freedoms are just as valuable as your freedoms, and so on. People can also simply choose, in this model, to follow other informational sources that are driven by non-democratic, supremacist-leaning, and anti-scientistic principles. When they choose these sources that are under no obligation to provide any evidence-based explanation for the things they are experiencing, that they don’t like, or that give them pause – when they choose information sources that are driven by their identity frameworks – it is easy to lean toward the people who look like them and who speak with authority just out of a sense of superiority instead of a dedication to truth-seeking (Maly 2024; Skocpol & Williamson 2016; Tripodi 2022).

The democratic moral-political framework is an aspiration, as are all moral-political frameworks; but we’ve seen glimpses of the good it can do when people buy into and invest themselves in it

When such anti-democratic moral-political frameworks are mainstreamed against the general moral-political principles that have given this nation such great aspiration for equality and evidence-based, capitalistic democracy for nearly three centuries now, and when those information sources that feed these motivations are not beholden to any regulations regarding substantiation and the pursuit of truth, then they are given the opportunity to completely exit the moral-political epistemological framework that informs democracy, and to engage in a “metapolitics” that aims to destroy this system (Maly 2024). 

That is what has happened to the far-right wing of this country as they have taken all of this deregulation, anti-intellectualization, and so on, into the great halls of power of this nation. They have abused the definitions that have been used to form the moral-political foundations of the United States. Take, most prominently, the right to free speech and a free press – if not the, then at least a central founding principle of this nation. Foundationally, this freedom has been defined as a freedom, among regular citizens, from punishment for criticizing their government (rightly or wrongly); it’s also been a freedom, for the press, from punishment by the government when they expose its wrongdoings, and also when they mistakenly present incorrect information. 

Education and democracy

These principles have nothing to say about whether there should be strict standards for journalistic integrity; whether there should be standards regarding the mass distribution of information via privatized television stations or well-funded social media accounts. The assumption, therefore, that free speech and a free press implies, more or less, that actors will be driven to present and to consume evidence-based information is something that has lay relatively latent – as an “understood” – within the foundational epistemology of the modern nation-state. 

But the Republican Party’s leadership and their increasingly powerful propaganda system over the last several decades has taken this notion of freedom and turned it into willy nilly “freedom to say whatever you want and, if you have the money, have as many people hear it as you want.” This deviation from – in fact, overt refusal of – any sort of devotion to evidence based norms violates Americans’ freedom to have access to evidence-based, truth seeking, journalistic and scientistic standards of integrity, and now we are seeing first hand that even in a democracy, where free speech is privileged and a free press is expected, the government must intervene to maintain a certain, specific, moral-political epistemological “bubble” in which our Constitution’s guiding frameworks are non-negotiable among those with the power to distribute information to wide swathes of the population.

These principles must be taught through our education systems, to everyone. The power to spread lies and anti-democratic principles must be limited through legislation. And guarantees must be in place to help everyone buy into an evidence- and rights-based democratic system through the strengthening of people’s quality of life and their universal access to education that is driven by scientistic, evidence-based principles.

It’s hard to come out and say that even in a free speech driven democracy, the principle of free speech cannot be without limits (even though this already is the case and there’s plenty of legislation limiting free speech); that principles of capitalism and journalistic integrity cannot be left unregulated; and that schools must “indoctrinate” students on “scientism”, on rights, on the pursuit of reliable information. But in the end, democracy is a delimited moral-political framework just like any other. That is to say, like any moral framework, it must enforce boundaries for its norms. Unlike many others, it requires humans to seek their best selves, recognize themselves in others, and really make life better for all using evidence-based practices in collecting and distributing information among the electorate. It’s what our founders requested of us as they laid out their desires in the Constitution and in the Federalist Papers; it’s even what Adam Smith — famously misinterpreted to have favored right-wing deregulated free market talking points — meant when he talked about democracy and capitalism: he, like the American educational philosopher John Dewey later on, was strongly in favor of a universal public education system that equally distributed these principles (Dewey 1916, Weinstein 2013).

We have now seen where the active metapolitical refusal of democratic principles has taken us and will take us, and that is to the logical end of the desires of the far-right: no rights to reliable information; no rights to evidence-based “truths”; no rights to equality; and no rights to democracy. In sum, no rights to rights. The democratic moral-political framework is an aspiration, as are all moral-political frameworks. We’ve seen glimpses of the good it can do when people buy into and invest themselves in it, and we’re also now facing the clear and present dangers of what will happen if such an aspirational framework is taken away from us.

References:

Bimber, B. (2003). Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power. Cambridge University Press.

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. Penn State Electronic Classics Series. Accessed 8 November, 2024: 

Green, J. (2009). The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship. Oxford University Press.

Maly, I. (2024). Metapolitics, Algorithms and Violence: Far-right Activism and Terrorism in the Attention Economy. Routledge.

Skocpol, T. & Williamson, V. (2016). The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Updated edition. Oxford University Press.

Tripodi, F. (2022). The Propagandists' Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy. Yale University Press.

Weinstein, J. (2013). Adam Smith's Pluralism: Rationality, Education, and the Moral Sentiments. Yale University Press.

Zentz, L. (2021). Narrating Stance, Morality, and Political Identity: Building a Movement on Facebook. Routledge.