11 The Coordinated Attack on Authoritative Institutions Defending Democracy in the Disinformation Age W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston
Following Donald Trump’s astonishing electoral college victory in 2016, scholars, journalists, and citizens alike looked for explanations as to how an evident liar, both sexist and racist, running against a former secretary of state and US senator, won 46 percent of the popular vote.1 More distressing still, Trump’s victory fit a broader pattern of twenty-first century authoritarianism. The British far-right inspired Brexit referendum in June, followed a few months later by Trump’s victory, signaled a darker turn in global politics.2 With the emergence of illiberal democracies in Russia, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey, and with the growing strength of far-right parties in France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany, liberal democracies around Europe were faltering.3 Remarkably, the United States found itself on the same “road to unfreedom” historian Timothy Snyder spoke of in describing the consolidation of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian grip on the Russian Federation.4 Indeed, Trump’s unctuous coddling of Putin and other strongmen only deepened many people’s anxieties. What explains such a jolting shift in Western liberal democratic politics?5 There’s been no shortage of explanations. While some observers focus narrowly on immediate circumstantial factors, others emphasize the role of globalization and the economic changes that have refigured existing divisions of race, gender, and class in explaining the rise of the authoritarian far-right, including Trump’s victory.6 Among the more popular explanations, focus centers on the role of social media platforms and their algorithmic tendency to descend deeper into extremist content. Here the path to understanding is found in parsing technological effects.
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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914628.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press