Fake Democracy Feels Better than the Real Thing

An incredibly popular and somewhat dictatorial television event reveals something crucial about what the human brain wants, and how hard it is to deliver that through democracy.

From a hotel gym this weekend, I watched democracy in one corner, and the illusion of democracy in another.

On one screen, CNN.

Fareed Zakaria held forth on the “superpresidency” that Donald Trump’s White House seems to be assembling from overlooked statutes that have been lying around waiting to be abused by an unscrupulous administration. He quoted experts, and warned of a true threat to the constitution.

On the other screen, the NFL Draft.

Thousands of fans gathered happily in Green Bay, Wisconsin, bedecked in jerseys and facepaint, to be on site as the NFL’s newest players were announced one by one.

But here’s the crucial difference that struck me. Zakaria and CNN, along with all the other news outlets struggling to retain an audience right now, cover democracy’s threats and victories. In theory, their role is to inform citizens so as to prepare us for the hard choices that democracy requires. Their work particularly focuses on the people whose biographies, motives, and tendencies will likely affect our nation.

The NFL Draft also offers detailed coverage of the dozens of young men whose biographies, motives, and tendencies will likely affect their team. If anything, that coverage is even more detailed, and certainly more expensively produced. But the thousands of people who drove and flew to Green Bay to be on site are not participating in anything even remotely democratic. They have no say in what happens. They are literally gathering to be told what the bosses have decided. But they sing and curse and celebrate and boo with the fierce energy one could only hope a group of voters might bring to democracy.

Eagles fans in Philadelphia. Photo by Casey Murphy on Unsplash

And of course, here’s the thing: CNN’s ratings have cratered in recent months, falling below a dismal 500,000 viewers in primetime last week for the first time, according to Adweek.

The NFL Draft drew more than 7 million viewers that morning, after one of its best first-day audiences ever, at more than 13.6 million viewers.

What is this moment, in which the play-acting of democracy is vastly more popular and attractive than the real thing?

In this week’s podcast, John Patty and Elizabeth Penn, a married political science-mathematician duo from Emory University, explained to me that the best you can hope for in a democracy is that its participants continue to believe in its legitimacy. You can’t have consensus. You maybe can’t even have majority will. The math doesn’t work. Instead, citizens just continue making hard choices as a group, and accept the many disappointments that will accompany that process, because the system has reassured them that it’s not capricious, and it’s not arbitrary.

The threat they describe in our conversation, of course, is the rise of a form of conservative politics that has decided it’s better to attack democratic legitimacy in the interest of winning than it is to protect that legitimacy and risk losing. (They also talk a great deal about how algorithms and A.I. are going to mislead our judgement, a conclusion they helped me reach in my book.) One reviewer of their work reffered to it as a “thicker conception of democracy,” which I think is very apt. They’re the kind of thinkers we’re going to need if we’re going to keep this grand democratic experiment going.

In 2016, Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times just after Donald Trump’s first presidential victory, cited a Zimbabwean friend who Friedman recalled saying “you Americans kick around your country like it’s a football. But it’s not a football. It’s a Fabergé egg. You can break it.” I think we’re beginning to realize that like so many modern institutions on which we rely, democracy isn’t a given. It’s in fact very hard to keep alive, and we have only the faintest and most naive sense of how to do it.

When I was first hired at NBC News, I was sent to a remote campground on the East Coast to take a course in how to survive in hazardous environments. The logic — and it’s sound logic — was that journalists often have to operate out past the normal boundaries of available help, and thus have to know how to rescue themselves and each other when it comes to it. So we spent several days learning how to communicate securely on our phones, how to negotiate with (and when to back away from) riot police, what to do if a grenade is thrown. And of course a huge amount of the training had to do with First Aid, so that we can stabilize a wounded colleague for a long drive from a remote place.

The two instructors — former international military operatives — kept coming back to a particularly disturbing theme when it came to First Aid: doing the right thing for someone usually causes them pain. A tourniquet is a good example. The application of enough force under the strap of a tourniquet to crush blood vessels and cut off bleeding? That hurts. And as it was explained to us, the tourniquet not only continues to hurt; the pain increases over time. After an hour “they’re going to be begging you to take it off,” the instructor warned us. “You don’t get any thanks for this kind of thing.”

This runs parallel to the idea I heard again and again from behavioral scientists I interviewed for the 2022 PBS documentary series Hacking Your Mind. Good choices, they told me — the ones that do your future self a favor, or that create improved conditions for everyone, not just for you — don’t feel good. There’s no dopamine reward for that kind of stuff. It’s all just abstract rightness. It turns out being on the right side of history isn’t as electrifying as cheesecake or sex or cigarettes.

This is the essential dilemma I was experiencing in the hotel gym as I rested between sets. Brilliant journalists describing the beginnings of a constitutional crisis? No dopamine there. Superhumans hired by shadowy bosses to undertake televised violence for millions of dollars? Hell yeah. Democracy doesn’t feel good. Tribal celebration does. And the crucial legitimacy of the one is under attack while the other doesn’t bother itself with promising any more legitimacy than it can deliver. We’ll need to make one more like the other if we’re to get through all this.