Four fault lines afflicting American electoral democracy
Friday, September 27, 2024. By B. Kumaravadivelu
It is a vexed and vexing truth that American electoral democracy remains flawed. While there are several intractable factors that has been contributing to this condition, including a Constitutional requirement that gives primacy to the Electoral College rather than to popular vote, I believe four major ones affect the current presidential election season in a deeply deplorable fashion.
First and foremost is the unenlightened electorate:
It has been pointed out that many American people remain uninformed and unlearned thereby exhibiting a pathetic lack of basic knowledge required to make proper judgements about electoral matters that matter to them.
A recent study conducted by the?U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation?found that more than 70% of Americans failed a civic literacy test on topics such as the three branches of government, and other basic functions of our democracy.
Many such unenlightened people are emotion-driven single-issue voters. By and large, they prioritize religious, racial and cultural issues over and above economic and security issues, thereby voting against their own vital interests.
Consider the following:
Leaders of a newly formed Uncommitted National Movement say that they will not vote for the Vice President Kamala Harris because, they “can’t stomach” her stance on Gaza. Her other progressive policies and practices which they like are now secondary to them.
There are many conservative women who have now pledged to support the candidacy of the Democratic nominee solely based on her strong views about abortion and reproductive freedom.
Conversely, Lila Rose, a popular Instagram influencer and an ardent supporter of former president Donald Trump, urged more than a million of her followers to vote against him this time because he has not taken a bold stand on abortion. He has also called himself a leader of IVF, something abhorred by Rose and other anti-abortion activists. All the other Trump’s policies and practices that they liked and supported in the past do not matter at all to them.
Such unenlightened voters easily render American electoral democracy vulnerable to political manipulation.
This is not a new phenomenon. Nearly a century ago, writing in his 1922 book?Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann, one of the most influential journalists of the 20th century, cautioned us against two kinds of “uninstructed” voters. “There is the man,” he observed “who does not know and knows that he does not know. He is generally an enlightened person. … But there is also the man who is uninstructed and does not know that he is, or care. He can always be gotten to the polls, if the party machinery is working. His vote is the basis of the machine.”
It appears that the number of the second kind of voters has multiplied in recent times in spite of the fact that in the last 40 years,?the American electorate?has become much more educated.
It is not too difficult to assign blame for such a lamentable condition.
Ideologically-skewed media constitute the second major fault line:
In a series of critical review, the British magazine?The Economist?judged that the American media “lets down readers and voters” without providing a “fair-minded, fact-checked coverage” needed to broaden its readers’ outlook.
Any objective analysis of the American media will reveal that it serves its readers with a very restricted range of views failing to equip them with information necessary to form their own judgements so that they can act as responsible citizens of a pluralistic democracy.
Besides, American media have become ideologically-skewed.
Liberal media such as?The New York Times?and?The Washington Post?as well as CNN, and conservative media such as?American Spectator?and?National Review?as well as?The Fox News Channel?all use biased language and terminology that appeal only to their ardent supporters and so fail to persuade others. They all follow the same strategy to achieve their narrow end: suppression of truth and suggestion of falsehood.
Nothing testifies to the media bias more than the fact that Trump prefers presidential debate on Fox and Harris prefers one on CNN.
Raising voters’ critical awareness of sociopolitical situations prevailing in the country at any given time is in large part the task of the TV and print media.
The failure of the media has not gone unnoticed by a section of the electorate.
According to a recent research article “The share of Americans who said they had a great deal or a lot of?confidence in newspapers?fell from 51 percent in 1979 to 20 percent in 2021. It was much the same for television news, dropping from 46 percent in 1993 to 16 percent in 2021.”
Aggravating their distrust are the algorithms of social media which intensify divisive discourse by promoting fake news and misinformation. Unfortunately, only these types of discourse “generate the most shares, comments, and likes” and they are also easily reproducible.
What American media need for their renewal, it seems to me, is critical self-reflection.
Uncritical media that shirk their prime responsibility to keep the citizens well-informed are injurious to the nation’s democratic health.
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Complicit in the media’s lack of objective presentation of sociopolitical events are media-affiliated pundits.
Ideologized pundits constitute the third fault line:
Journalistic punditry has become a ubiquitous feature of modern media. It has mushroomed recently.
According to?Mike McDevitt, Professor of journalism and media studies, the expansion of opinion journalism in?The New York Times?over the last few decades is illustrative. His research showed that “the paper published just two columnists in the early 1950s. By 1994, the?Times?featured eight. A similar expansion occurred at?The Washington Post?and many regional newspapers across the country.” Perhaps, the number has increased even more in the last decade.
A similar trend can be noticed in TV journalism as well.
No doubt, there are a handful of pundits who take the time and effort to read widely, think critically, analyze objectively, and formulate their thoughts in such a way as to educate the reading public.
Many others, however, see only the baffling daily chaos that beset our society and are unable or unwilling to go beyond superficial narratives often hurriedly put together to meet deadlines.
Several of them are partisan political pundits even though they masquerade themselves as public intellectuals. In reality, they reduce themselves to “talking heads” often spewing inflammatory opinions and hurling insults at other pundits whom they disagree with.
In addition, they show blind loyalty to the aims and objectives of the partisan news outlets that hire them knowing fully well that in a presidential election these outlets promote a particular candidate belonging to a particular political party.
Such a behavior prompted a columnist from?The Guardian?to assert that “the pundit class of the American media is providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of one candidate.”
What is even more deplorable is that some of their opinion pieces deliberately blur news items making it difficult for the common listener/reader to tell the difference between personal views and professional news reporting.
In doing so, many of them toe the lines of powers that be.
Power-hungry politicians form the fourth fault line:
The three fault lines highlighted above are supplied with much-needed oxygen by those narrow-minded politicians who care more for their own power and perks then for the welfare of the people they claim to serve.
For them, polarization has become an easy strategy. It is used prominently in recent elections, more so in the current election season.
Political leaders from both the parties, with very few exceptions, never fail to exploit group consciousness among the people. They cling to the false notion of identity politics they themselves created for their own vested interest. They engage in sickening stereotypes portraying each religious, racial and ethnic group as a monolithic entity believing in the same thing and behaving in the same way.
The Republicans continue to amplify white identity politics while the Democrats continue to amplify the group identities of everybody else: women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, LGBTQ+ communities, etc.
Sadly, mindless polarization is being taken to a low point in the current presidential election.
Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance, a Senator from Ohio, has created false cat memes claiming that Haitian migrants are eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio.
The city Mayor debunked the rumors that have saddled him with security issues. The state governor called the rumors “a piece of garbage that was simply not true.”
Expanding his remarks further and writing in?The New York Times,?Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, put the record straight: “Springfield is having a resurgence?in manufacturing and job creation. Some of that is thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants who have arrived in the city over the past three years to fill jobs. They are there legally. They are there to work.”
Faced with rebuttals from officials of his own State and presented with fact-checks by media that proved his claim to be fake, Vance defended himself saying “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Creating and dissemination fake news is acceptable to them if it serves their political purpose.
Politicians continue to use not-so-subtle dog whistles to excite a segment of the electorate, thereby appealing to our worst instincts instead of “the better angels of our nature.”
Bombarded with misinformation and disinformation from the media, from the politicians and from the pundits, the American electorate get distorted pictures of their own society and end up electing the same politicians who contribute to the blights that afflict the American electoral system.
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