A tasteful lack of American carnage: Inauguration Day, 2013/Shutterstock

In the ten years since Policy magazine was launched, the global war on democracy — from the chaos of Brexit and the Trump presidency to Vladimir Putin’s illegal war on Ukraine — has become the dominant political story. Lisa Van Dusen, the magazine’s associate editor and deputy publisher, has written extensively about the evolution of that story from her perspective of more than two decades covering US and international politics. Here’s her look at democracy’s very long decade of upheaval.

Lisa Van Dusen

February 18th, 2023

Any exploration of the evolution of democracy over the decade since Policy magazine began publishing begins with two points of context. First, the real story of democracy’s recent evolution goes back not a decade but a quarter century. Second, that story has to begin in America, as the world’s democratic superpower.

When we look at not just the trajectory democracy has taken since the turn of the millennium but the reasons for that trajectory — roll the montage of the Florida recounts, the 9/11 attacks, the “slam dunk”, propaganda-rationalized invasion of Iraq, the Abu Ghraib images, the explosion of foreclosure-signs-as-lawn-ornaments following the financial cataclysm of 2008, the misdirectional “American carnage” clip from the 2017 inaugural address, the January 6, 2021 proof of its irony in the form of a ransacked US Capitol, and the positive (unless you’re partial to carnage) highlights of Barack Obama’s 2004 Democratic convention speech, the National Mall on Inauguration Day in 2009, Joe Biden’s post-riot inaugural address and his State of the Union this February 7^th — the seeds of every major narrative and many of the minor ones in-between were sown in the last decade of the last century.

Democracy has had a roller-coaster 21^st century. Our current parade of political events — skewed by tactical scenery chewing and distorted by operationalized agendas playing out across social media platforms and op-ed pages in the universal dateline of the virtual content sphere — attests to that. Our political narratives have become so preposterously, provocatively performative that propaganda has graduated, in the age of viral, emotionally manipulative content, from a clumsy, old-school tool of totalitarian disinformation and behaviour modification to a covert-ops business model for the dystopian weaponization of human beings against each other. As we approach the end of the first quarter of the first century of the second millennium, the battle over what kind of power will define our future has taken on all the industrialized psychopathology of Orwellian-nightmare-as-dinner-theatre, with the dodgy escapism of Squid Game and Emily in Paris thrown in for palliative distraction.

This story did not begin on January 20^th, 2017. It did not even begin on September 11th, 2001 or with the apparent damp squib of Y2K, 18 months earlier. The 21^stcentury started on January 17^th, 1998, in the form of a headline on a website. NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN, blared the Drudge Report home page, with all the all-caps sense of occasion required of a moment Matt Drudge referred to 20 years later as “The dawn of the digital age.” That Saturday headline forced the hand of established media outlets, and by Wednesday, January 21^st, I was sitting at a Starbucks two blocks from the White House at 8:00 a.m., reading the page one Washington Post story Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie, on my way to work on the desk at United Press International. What Drudge first archly framed as a media story based on the spiking of a Newsweek piece became the political story that defined an era.

The digital age that revolutionized communication and transformed the realms of intelligence, journalism, politics, finance, law enforcement, crime, medicine, education, science, culture, elections, workplace and social interaction — in other words, life — first spent 1998 exploding the norms on scandal, privacy, crisis management, media coverage and political warfare. It expanded the 24-hour-a-day news cycle that began with CNN two decades earlier by several orders of volume, velocity and consumption magnitude. It turned what was already a highly tactical Washington into a hypertactical, relentlessly reactive, narrative warfare incubator in which all the worst political practices on display today could be witnessed in their primitive form — from winning the day to hijacking the narrative to the broader obsession with perception, manipulation and political survival over truth. The impact of that year was so germane to so many subsequent, asymmetrically consequential outcomes — from the 2000 presidential election to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the death of the Middle East Peace Process to the advent of hyperpartisanship to China’s rise to Russia’s post-Cold War alienation to the free-for-all of the financial cataclysm to the election of Donald Trump to precisely where we are today — that it’s not only futile but dysphoric to entertain the what-ifs of a counterfactual history.

The battle over what kind of power will define our future has taken on all the industrialized psychopathology of Orwellian-nightmare-as-dinner-theatre, with the dodgy escapism of Squid Game and Emily in Paris thrown in for palliative distraction.

When we published the first issue of Policy in the spring of 2013, Obama was three months into his second term. The 2012 presidential campaign had been run within reasonable guardrails of taste, toxicity and tactical triangulation. Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney was as close to Marquess of Queensberry rules as American politics gets.

(Full disclosure, I volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008 for the South Carolina primary and covered the rest of the campaign as a columnist for Sun Media before moving back to Washington to cover the administration from there).

Obama’s presidency shook the pre-existing power hierarchy of US politics, revealing an eloquent gap between the popular support he received in the first back-to-back majorities in more than half a century and the resentment of the entrenched interests he challenged by being the first Black president. As the former president himself wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, A Promised Land, “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.” And, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in We Were Eight Years in Power: “Obama, his family, and his administration were a walking advertisement for the ease with which Black people could be fully integrated into the unthreatening mainstream of American culture, politics and myth. And that was always the problem.”

The 2016 US presidential campaign was a clash of the backlashes: the racist backlash personified by the white supremacist caricature of the Republican candidate and, on the Democratic side, the backlash against the deferment of a comeback and redemption narrative long depicted and leveraged as inevitable. That highly resistible admixture produced headlines like FiveThirtyEight’s Americans’ Distaste For Both Trump And Clinton Is Record-Breaking and The New York Times’ Voters Express Disgust Over U.S. Politics in New Times/CBS Poll, and made “dumpster fire” the American Dialect Society’s word of the year for 2016.

Then came the backlash presidency.

The global war on democracy fuelled by a combination of the fourth industrial revolution, motive and opportunity among an assortment of vested interests has endangered privacy rights, voting rights and reproductive rights, among other human rights declensions. It has elevated hypercorruption to cult status. It has made intelligence interests disproportionately powerful via unprecedented resources and impunity, ludicrously bloated asset lists and post-internet technological capabilities, including cheap, ubiquitous and undetectable surveillance and hacking. It has insidiously blurred the line between journalism and propaganda and made mendacity and shamelessness the new shortcuts to power. It has aimed to neutralize the systemic soft-power disparity that won the West the Cold War by making democracy seem dysfunctional, intractable, dangerous and riddled with imbeciles, phoneys and thugs. Donald Trump’s presidency was both a symptom and a weapon of that war.

Meanwhile, as an American president who has made a point of using his power to deliver both political truth and policy solutions to Americans, Joe Biden — like other Western leaders who’ve taken the side of defending democracy and the existing, liberal world order — has been a target of every conceivable narrative warfare and propaganda ploy. Biden — in his response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in his response to Republican performative bollocks from Trump and an expanding cast of propaganda clowns, and in his blunt articulation of the stakes of this moment — has also begun to turn the tide back toward sanity, as evidenced in the 2022 midterm election results.

In previous, pre-internet fights for democracy, the relationship between those demanding rights and those refusing them was more overt, more accurately labelled; the grievances of the targeted and the costs to their persecutors more discernible. On February 15^th, 1965, legendary civil rights organizer Reverend C.T. Vivian was punched in the face by Selma, Alabama Sheriff Jim Clark — a man whose racist fury and brutality had earned him a reputation as Bull Conor without the dogs and firehoses — as the cameras were rolling on the steps of the Selma courthouse. It was just five minutes in an anti-democracy syllabus of analog physical violation from arbitrary arrests to lynchings. “We’re willing to be beaten for democracy,” Vivian yelled at Clark, his mouth bloody. “And you misuse democracy in the street. You beat people bloody in order that they will not have the privilege to vote.”

The interests attacking democracy today use more covert methods of violation, adapted and scaled up for a technologically shrunken, borderless sphere of operations. But all pathocracies — from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa to the Jim Crow South — express the same systemic contempt for humanity that is a tell and a trademark of unhinged tyranny. As was much more obvious during the civil rights era but remains true today, you can’t wage war on democracy without waging war on humanity.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen has served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.