In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Jay Gupta, Mark Kelly, and Tim Luke about the changing character of the public sphere. Their wide-ranging conversation covers a number of topics, including the ways that social media has fragmented the public sphere into separate echo chambers; how the internet has contributed to an insurgent populism around the world and the efforts by traditional stakeholders to shut it down; the atrophy of the value of truth and the dominance of “bullshit” in the Trump era; the extent to which moral earnestness preserves an aspiration to truthfulness; Trumpism and the critique of society as controlled by unaccountable New Class elites; the ongoing Trumpification of the Republican Party; and the conflation versus the interpenetration of elitism and expertise. Telos 195 (Summer 2021) features a forum on the public sphere with articles by Gupta, Kelly, and Luke, excerpts of which appear below. Read the full articles at the Telos Online website (subscription required). To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 195 are available for purchase in our online store.
Speaking B.S. to Truth: The Public Sphere in the Age of Trump
Jay A. Gupta
If a segment of the population has not acquired the broad habits of mind and the knowledge base that encourage any sense of why truthful, informed discourse matters to the preservation of our democratic institutions, then it is not that such persons cease to be responsive to the idea of democracy; they just cease to be responsive to its “epistemic dimension.” Social and political alienation contributes to a pervasive sense of untruth, that it is “all a lie.” If it is all a lie, it hardly matters what anyone thinks or says. Nonetheless, the constant circulation of an emotionally charged rhetoric of democracy does not fail to arouse enthusiasm. A nationwide “bullshit session” can turn ugly. A combination of anger, cynicism, and resentment does not encourage an interest in how a machine that is perceived to be operated by powerful anonymous agents actually works; it arouses an interest in what might happen if you pour cement into it, or light it on fire. It is conceivable that the actual machinery of our democracy—its institutions, processes, and traditions—could well be incinerated without attracting much fanfare or notice from the population in question.
Yet as the agitators draped in American flags at the Capitol riots made clear, the rhetoric of democracy remains paramount. And though the fever pitch of such rhetoric has diminished to some degree as a new administration settles into office, we can be sure it is still circulating far and wide on the “periphery,” and that it retains a powerful attraction for an alienated demos, disconnected from and uninterested in “tracking truth.”
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The Closing of the American Public Sphere
Mark G. E. Kelly
The universal adoption of the internet and invention of social media threatened to create a public sphere where access was more genuinely public than at any point in history. Ideas circulated and associations formed relatively free from both tyrannies of distance and establishment gatekeeping. The concrete results, however, were unexpected and horrifying to elites that had allowed this situation to emerge via neoliberal presumptions that free markets would only redound to their benefit. The educated were horrified at how the ideas that contradicted theirs proved popular. Capitalists were horrified at the destabilizing effect on markets (although they liked the opportunity to mine data and sell things to the politically incorrect). The old media—publishers and journalists—were perhaps the most unhappy because this all seemed to be causing their business model to enter a free fall and hence to threaten their very livelihoods. Politicians and entrenched power elites (including the deep state) hated the loss of control of information and the direct threats to their control via the election of populist leaders via online campaigns.
This produced an extraordinarily powerful coalition for the regulation and control of this new public sphere. Since it is not yet normatively possible to complain about the free exchange of ideas or online democracy per se, the normative basis for the fightback against online populism was the proposition that certain ideas are inherently bad and hence need to be excised from the public sphere, requiring the imposition of control over the unruly internet. Which particular ideas were declared bad depended on the balance of ideological forces existing in society at this time, but also on what the dominant elites came to see as the main threat to their dominance.
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The Changing Public Sphere in America: The Fragility of Civic Awareness, Common Community, and Electoral Democracy Today
Timothy W. Luke
Perhaps nothing underscores how changed, if not corrupted, the conditions of the public sphere in the United States have become in 2021 than the weeks of chaos between the national elections of November 3, 2020, and Inauguration Day on January 20, 2021. Desperate to attain victory at almost any cost, President Trump openly challenged the legality of electoral outcomes in six key swing states, while claiming that widespread voter fraud, election tampering, and media misrepresentation had all been directed at his campaign to rob him of a second term in the White House. Millions of Republican voters did not question his wild assertions as they followed him on social media. Most backed President Trump no matter what he did, remaining defiantly ignorant about the intricate processes of American electoral democracy, including the constitutional provisions for its conduct that have been taught to all citizens for over 230 years. Hence, heated White House narratives about electoral fraud were trusted more than certified voting results reported out of Democratic and Republican precincts all across the nation.
Refusing to concede the victory to former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump mounted fruitless legal challenges to election outcomes in several states, pressured state officials into recounts to overturn results he rejected, and whipped thousands of his most ardent supporters in the “Make America Great Again” movement to contest the certification of Electoral College votes. Allegedly staged as peaceful protests to “stop the steal” by the Democratic Party of the GOP’s putatively rightful victory, they quickly became much more. Emboldened to take direct action, many marched on the Capitol to disrupt the congressional proceedings to count the Electoral College votes under Vice President Mike Pence’s guidance on January 6, 2021. A deadly riot ensued. Some protestors broke into the building, seeking to harm members of Congress as well as Vice President Pence, which led to hundreds of arrests, thousands of injuries, and five deaths before Congress could reconvene to certify the election’s outcome for the American public as well as both political parties’ voters.
