I believe this takes a very wrong turn about here: "By removing barriers to entry and the influence of elite gatekeepers, they radically democratised the public sphere."
Excuse me for a moment: ELON MUSK IS THE RICHEST PERSON IN THE WORLD! He is *AN ELITE* - of elites - by any but the most tortured definitions. And that's just one example.
The public sphere has not been "democratised". Instead, civic institutions have been destroyed, in favor of strengthening the influence of propagandists (sigh - Internet necessity - what didn't I say? I didn't say "Propagandists never existed before the Internet, or in previous media". The word I used was *strengthening*, as in existed before but now have greater power). This isn't a technological determinism claim for social media. Rather, that's one part of a very big story, and shouldn't be considered in isolation from very deliberate decisions to deform the public sphere.
A key problem is an implicit restriction of "elites" to apparently mean something like "some concern about facts", rather than more at political power. Thus, public health officials will then count as "elites", but right-wing anti-vax lunatics won't count as "elites", even if they're Secretary Of Health and come from a family political dynasty.
I was around for the first wave of Social Media evangelism, and got slammed for repeatedly pointing out that the "No Gatekeepers" slogan was just different and far worse gatekeepers. Which I suppose is sort of self-proving the uselessness of making that point.
From an outside perspective though, it appears more like Elon acts more like one of the herd than an opinion maker. He and the President spend too much time on social media and change their actions to follow the conspiracy of the day rather than using their wealth and power to manipulate public opinion. They do also try to do the latter, but its all rather clumsy.
"Elite" is a strange word, and here its clearly being used as "Liberal intelligentsia" which helps to leave wealth out of the equation. The intelligentsia of the west is largely struggling with this issue of democratizing information bringing illiberal thought to the forefront of politics. Elon Musk is much less of a gatekeeper of information than the old bosses of TV stations and NYT editors. His wealth has little impact on the fact that the information on X is more open to the public than the front page of the Washington Post.
Another notable point to this is that many of those right wing elites have pretty clearly changed their views over time rather than simply revealed existing beliefs. This is especially stark in the tech right like Elon and Marc Andreesen who's online content and demeanor changed over the last 5-10 years from being pretty normal center-ish business personalities to erratic right wing radicals spouting about Great Replacement Theory. I don't think social media explains that entire shift and I'm sure there was some existing foundation for those beliefs, but it's also hard to ignore how stark the change was amid a clear addiction to these platforms.
Elon is a bit different, but you can explain the rightward turn of tech industry without reference to actual right wing politics. When the activist base of the party you’ve always supported decides to demonize everything from how you transport your employees to the supposed effects of your product on society and sets up the FTC to go after your, you’re likely to be disaffected. I don’t agree with Zuckerberg or Andrewsen about this. My first rule of politics is I don’t support people who attempted a coup. But I don’t find their choice terribly surprising
Elon Musk lasted a few months in the Trump admin and accomplished nothing. He's now persona non-grata amongst both the right and the left.
The signature issue he ruptured with the right on, H1Bs, ended up being decided in favor of the people he said he would "rip the faces off of". The cap hasn't been increased, there is $100,000 visa fee, and the lottery has been replaced with salary prioritization.
He couldn't even get his EV credits to stick for his cars.
Some elite.
To the extent he had views that were broadly shared by the median voter (say on trans issues) they got implemented anyway.
A sign someone or some institution is "elite" is that they can get policy to differ from the median voters preferences. We've got a SALT deduction in the OBBB not because the median voter wants it, but because elites in blue states want it. We had affirmative action forever not because it ever won a referendum, but because the elites wanted it. Trans, open borders, etc.
Trump's around because there are a lot of issues where the elite has tried to ram through things the median voter hates, and so he can position himself in the meaty part of a bunch of 60/40, 70/30, 80/20 issues and people care more about that then his particular personality flaws.
That doesn’t really stand up to examination, though. If you look across social media forums, places where there’s less gate keeping are more populist. That goes for everything from the various incarnations of Facebook to X versus Twitter to Reddit in the days where r/TheDonald was allowed to run riot to the depths of 4chan or whatever it calls itself now. You can protest with some justices that social media companies aren’t ever truly content neutral, but generally when they’ve had their thumb on the scale it’s been against populism, not for it.
Yes, something had changed and I think you’re right that the shift to engagement based feeds is a big part of it. But my point was that direct editorial control doesn’t seem to have much to do with it. For the most part, less control has meant more right wing populist content. It’s not because some conspiracy of tech billionaires is manipulating the content moderation to serve their own political interests. It’s that people engage more with right wing populist content. I don’t think we understand that terribly well, but it does seem to be the case.
There are two interesting counterpoints. First of course Elon has deliberately skewed moderation on X to favor material that supports his own politics. But for the most part those efforts seem to be just as transparent and ham fisted as Twitters earlier efforts to be socially responsible. For the most part the people controlling these platforms are just rising the tiger.
Second, BlueSky doesn’t have any overall editorial control, but of course it’s almost comically woke. The mean BlueSky poster seems to think the best way to overthrow fascism is to try to cancel Matt Yglesias. So unlike other sites they’re not preferentially engaging with right populist content but with equally insane progressive rabble rousing. I would guess this is to do with the seed user base at BlueSky, but I don’t know.
I think you’re right that social media didn’t corrupt democracy so much as expose it for what it was. But it doesn’t stop there. Once reflection became measurable, it became reflexive: the crowd trains the algorithm, and the algorithm trains the crowd. The mirror turns into a feedback loop. What began as democratization evolves into conditioning—the system teaching us what to want next.
“where the MAGA coalition has evolved into a highly authoritarian, extremely corrupt political movement…”
MAGA learned to fight liberal tyranny with more than words , as far as debate “peace has been murdered and dialogue shot in the throat.”
On the other hand your faction has Proved Him Wrong, Charlie Kirk.
Thank You.
These terms are acceptable.
We aren’t here long enough to be corrupt, a word the left now tosses like fascist, racist, etc.
perhaps you mean we can’t be bought? That must be disconcerting.
How a Liberal can say authoritarian or corrupt without choking is beyond me.
You are correct however that movements of the people are overthrowing the Liberal order all over the world. Ireland for instance, England, the Czechs if they’re allowed to vote and not thrown in jail, Hungary, Brazil if the opposition wasn’t in jail… Moldova if the opposition wasn’t in jail…
…. Indeed democracy is bad for Liberals.
In America Trump is proceeding lawfully, something he’ll likely regret, but Trump is holding back the tide… of most of the rest of us.
Perhaps you’ll always have Venezuela… or perhaps not.
Good article. I’ve had many of these thoughts for years but you’ve articulated them more clearly. Maybe rule by elites tempered by noblesse oblige or a Christian morality wasn’t so bad after all.
This line of thinking does lead one to some dark places though: delusions of grandeur or arrogance for one (well _I’m_ not one of these dumb voters), or even more scary, an almost Yarvin-like questioning of democracy itself. If my fellow citizens are such idiots, and infinite zero-cost communications empowers them all, how are we to organize and meet the real challenges we have as a species (eg climate change)?
Of course this is the arrogance of the Professional Managerial Class left that spent 2007-2022 or so ignoring democratic will and getting power via the levers of bureaucracy, academia, etc. which helped provoke the current backlash.
It’s funny/ironic how all our early optimism about the internet failed to recognize just how dumb (or short-sighted, high “time preference” as they say) many of our fellow homo sapiens are. The early internet evangelists didn’t know that, precisely because of elite control of popular discourse!
**Williams is right about the algorithm scapegoating—but his dichotomy is too simple**
Williams makes a compelling case that blaming algorithms for our political dysfunction is largely cope. I’m persuaded by his core argument: social media hasn’t manipulated “good” people into “bad” beliefs so much as it has revealed popular opinions that elite gatekeeping previously suppressed.
However, I think his framing—elite gatekeeping vs. unfiltered democracy—overlooks a crucial third dimension: **the institutional quality of democratic mediation**.
Not all democracies are created equal. Consider the distinction between representative systems where voters elect parties that promise simplified solutions in emotionally charged campaigns versus direct democratic systems—Switzerland being the paradigmatic example—where citizens vote on specific policy questions after structured public debate.
In Swiss-style direct democracy, proponents must articulate their positions with precision. Citizens engage with actual policy details rather than tribal signaling. The epistemic demands are higher—and this institutional architecture often produces more sophisticated outcomes than representative systems where professional politicians may themselves lack deep subject-matter expertise.
This matters because Williams treats “elites” as a functionally homogeneous category. But there’s a vast difference between:
- Domain experts with genuine technical competence
- Professional politicians whose primary skill is campaigning
- Symbolic political actors who’ve moved directly from university into political office
**Which elites are we defending?**
Here’s where my own experience becomes uncomfortably relevant. I live in a very small, highly international European country where local history risks being displaced rather than complemented by imported narratives of suffering and resistance.
We have streets named after international civil rights figures with no connection to our local history, while local resistance heroes—steelworkers who launched general strikes against fascism and were executed for it—remain uncommemorated. The small memorial to the boys who died in narrow mining shafts during our industrial revolution is unknown even to highly educated progressive friends and relatives.
I want to be clear: I’m not arguing against honoring figures like Ruby Bridges. I’m pointing to a problematic **displacement** of local memory—and more importantly, to the **impossibility of discussing this openly** without immediate accusations of xenophobia or worse.
**This is precisely where Williams’ analysis becomes complicated.** If legitimate concerns about the erasure of local working-class history cannot be articulated by educated elites without triggering moral panic, where do those concerns go? They don’t disappear. They migrate to spaces where they *will* be articulated—often by actors who genuinely *are* xenophobic, who instrumentalize legitimate grievances for illegitimate ends.
In other words: elite gatekeeping doesn’t just suppress “dangerous” ideas. It can also suppress *legitimate* concerns, thereby ensuring those concerns become associated with dangerous movements. The taboo becomes self-fulfilling.
This dynamic seems particularly relevant in a context where two-thirds of residents are non-citizens and over a hundred nationalities share political space. The accusation of xenophobia is empirically absurd here—yet it remains the immediate response to any questioning of how international narratives relate to local memory.
**Williams is right that social media reveals popular frustrations that elites previously suppressed. But he doesn’t adequately address whether those suppressions were always epistemically justified, or whether some were ideologically convenient silencings that created the very resentments now amplifying right-wing populism.**
Beyond symbolic politics, I observe other patterns that complicate Williams’ defense of elite competence: bicycle infrastructure installed by subdividing sidewalks and streets in areas where cycling rates remain minimal, worsening existing traffic problems. Now, I recognize this could reflect my own biases—perhaps the infrastructure will catalyze behavioral change over time. Perhaps I’m selecting examples that confirm my frustrations.
**But here’s my point**: If Williams is correct that elite gatekeeping had genuine epistemic value, shouldn’t we be able to point to evidence of superior elite competence? What I observe suggests that contemporary political elites often lack both the technical expertise and the local knowledge that might justify their gatekeeping role.
This isn’t a partisan critique. It’s a question about **institutional competence** that cuts across ideological lines. Williams’ analysis would be stronger if he distinguished between:
- Elites with domain expertise excluding genuinely harmful ideas
- Elites with ideological commitments excluding inconvenient realities
- Elites with professional incompetence making poor decisions
**The uncomfortable alternative**
Williams suggests that perhaps “democracy can’t survive too much democracy.” I’d propose a different formulation: perhaps democracy can’t survive **poor institutional design**, regardless of how much public participation it involves.
Swiss-style direct democracy isn’t simply “more democracy”—it’s *differently structured* democracy, with institutional mechanisms that enforce higher epistemic standards than many representative systems currently achieve.
This doesn’t resolve Williams’ core concern about the dangers of populism. But it suggests that the problem might not be “too much democracy” versus “necessary elite gatekeeping,” but rather the quality of the institutional architecture that mediates between public opinion and policy outcomes.
The troubling question becomes: If our political elites are increasingly selected for symbolic rather than substantive competence, aren’t we getting the worst of both worlds—neither genuine expertise nor genuine popular sovereignty?
I don’t have a clean answer. But I suspect Williams’ dichotomy, while more honest than the algorithm-scapegoating he criticizes, still doesn’t quite capture what’s gone wrong.
I found this comment incisive and a genuine supplement to the article. I wish I had the faculties to supply a plausible explanation of the rise in weak and/or incompetent, managerial-style leadership classes of the recent decades, then there might be a full thesis to digest.
Though Switzerland is a strange case as about 1/3 of Swiss *workers* aren't Swiss *citizens* (or so Google says) and guestworkers, rather than having permanent residence. And I'm sure the employment regulations generally give the citizens the best jobs. So a Swiss referendum is like a US election would be if the lowest income/status/and probably education 1/3 of the US population wasn't allowed to vote. That is, it would be heavily biased toward elites.
**On Democratic Representation, Migration, and the Limits of Simple Analogies: A Response**
The critique of Swiss direct democracy as exhibiting “elite bias” rests on a superficially plausible but ultimately misleading analogy: that excluding non-citizens from the franchise is equivalent to disenfranchising the lowest-income, lowest-status third of a population. This comparison, however, founders on two fundamental misconceptions—one empirical, one conceptual—and ultimately projects the demographic and institutional logic of large federal states onto small European polities where entirely different structural dynamics prevail.
**I. The Empirical Error: Non-Citizens Are Not a Homogeneous Underclass**
The central empirical claim—that Swiss non-citizens constitute something akin to “the lowest income/status/and probably education” third of the workforce—is demonstrably false. Switzerland’s foreign resident population is *highly stratified*, encompassing both low-wage service workers and some of the most privileged professionals in Europe.
Consider the case of German nationals, who currently represent roughly 9% of Switzerland’s foreign population (approximately 323,600 individuals as of early 2024, the second-largest foreign group by numbers). This community is characterized by exceptionally high rates of educational attainment and professional qualification: many relocate to Switzerland for well-compensated positions in healthcare (particularly as physicians and dentists), engineering, education, and IT. Salaries for German professionals in Switzerland routinely exceed those in Germany by 60–70%, making Swiss employment financially attractive for temporary, high-earning migration.
Crucially, many of these individuals explicitly pursue *short- to medium-term migration strategies*—they come to accumulate savings and career credentials before returning home or moving onward. This “pendulum migration” dynamic is reflected in relatively low rates of Swiss naturalization among German nationals, minimal long-term local attachment, and strikingly low engagement in local political life, even where institutional pathways for participation exist. The pattern repeats, with variation, across other well-educated migrant groups.
This empirical reality fundamentally undermines the analogy to a disenfranchised American underclass. The non-citizen population in Switzerland is not uniformly disadvantaged; it includes substantial cohorts of individuals who enjoy higher incomes, greater professional status, and more transnational mobility than many Swiss citizens. To frame their exclusion from the franchise as automatically reflecting “elite bias” is to misread both the composition of the migrant population and the nature of political exclusion itself.
**II. The Conceptual Error: Citizenship Exclusion Is Not Elite Gatekeeping**
Even if non-citizens were, on average, economically disadvantaged (which, as shown, they are not uniformly), the exclusion of non-citizens from voting rights would not constitute “elite bias” in any straightforward sense. The critique conflates two distinct phenomena: *socioeconomic stratification* and *political membership criteria*.
Elite bias, properly understood, occurs when institutional design systematically privileges the interests or perspectives of a narrow ruling class *within an already-defined polity*. What the critique actually identifies, however, is something altogether different: the structural fact that nation-states define political membership through citizenship, and that citizenship acquisition is governed by criteria—residency duration, language proficiency, integration standards, and sometimes cultural or historical belonging—that are independent of income or social status.
This distinction becomes even more salient when we examine cases where formal political rights *have* been extended to non-citizens. Luxembourg’s experience is instructive: despite granting municipal voting rights to long-term foreign residents, participation rates among the largest foreign community (Portuguese nationals) remain persistently low—frequently below 20%. This evidences that formal enfranchisement does not automatically translate into active democratic participation, particularly where linguistic, social, and cultural barriers persist, and where migration remains transnationally oriented or temporary in character.
Furthermore—and this point is often elided in debates that assume migrants are uniformly “powerless”—transnational mobility and dual citizenship can confer *disproportionate* political influence. The case of Turkish nationals in Germany illustrates this vividly: members of the Turkish diaspora vote in Turkish national elections, often with significantly higher support for nationalist candidates (e.g., Erdoğan) than the domestic Turkish electorate, precisely because they are insulated from the direct economic consequences (inflation, unemployment) of those policies. Far from being politically marginalized, such populations can exercise electoral leverage in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously, shaping outcomes in ways unavailable to “rooted” citizens. This dynamic is further amplified by European Union electoral law, which grants EU citizens the right to vote in European Parliament elections both in their country of residence *and*, in some cases, their country of origin—creating layered participatory structures that privilege mobile, transnationally networked individuals.
**III. The Structural Incommensurability of Small States**
The critique’s reliance on a US analogy betrays a deeper failure to recognize how profoundly scale, demographic composition, and institutional context shape the stakes of political inclusion. The comparison between Switzerland (or Luxembourg) and the United States is not merely imperfect—it is *structurally incommensurable*.
In large federal republics, migration is geographically diffuse, and even substantial immigration affects local communities unevenly and gradually. In small, open European polities, by contrast, migration can rapidly alter the entire demographic and cultural fabric of society. In Luxembourg, foreign residents comprise over 50% of the population, and cross-border commuters from France, Belgium, and Germany—who work daily in Luxembourg but reside and pay taxes abroad—constitute an additional, politically invisible labor force without representation in *any* jurisdiction where their economic activity is concentrated.
This creates a trilemma that has no analogue in the United States: Should resident foreigners vote, despite having no long-term stake and often limited linguistic or cultural integration? Should cross-border commuters vote, despite not residing in the polity? Or should only citizens vote, even when they constitute a demographic minority? The 2015 Luxembourg referendum on extending national voting rights to long-term foreign residents resulted in an overwhelming “No” (nearly 80% opposed)—not merely from xenophobic reaction, but because the electorate perceived, rightly or wrongly, that extending rights to resident foreigners while excluding economically vital cross-border workers was incoherent and incomplete.
At such demographic tipping points, the question of *who constitutes the demos* ceases to be a matter of expanding an existing franchise and becomes instead a fundamental, and potentially unresolvable, question of collective identity, stakeholdership, and the very boundaries of political community. This is categorically different from debates over voter suppression or elite gatekeeping in established nation-states with clear demographic majorities.
The critique’s analogy to elite bias collapses once we recognize that Swiss (and Luxembourgish) non-citizens are neither uniformly disadvantaged nor uniformly excluded from political influence. High-earning professionals often choose *not* to naturalize or participate locally, prioritizing transnational mobility over rootedness. Dual citizens and transnationally mobile migrants sometimes wield *greater* political leverage than “native” citizens, voting in multiple jurisdictions without bearing the full consequences of their choices. And in small states where migration reaches transformative proportions, the calculus of representation transcends questions of inclusion or exclusion, implicating deeper tensions about the nature and sustainability of political community itself.
None of this is to deny that meaningful questions about integration, representation, and fairness arise in Switzerland and Luxembourg. But those questions cannot be resolved—or even properly understood—through analogies to the United States or through simplistic narratives of “elite” citizens versus “powerless” migrants. The realities are far more complex, the power dynamics far more multi-directional, and the institutional challenges far more structurally rooted than such binaries allow.
Democratic theory and practice must grapple with these complexities honestly: acknowledging the stratification among migrants, the agency conferred by transnational mobility, and the legitimacy crises that arise when the very definition of “the people” becomes unsettled. Only then can debates about citizenship, suffrage, and belonging move beyond misleading analogies toward constructive engagement with the real—and often deeply uncomfortable—questions these small European democracies face.
**A final caveat is necessary.** Reductive narratives that portray all non-citizens as victims of elite gatekeeping—however well-intentioned—ultimately risk exacerbating the very pathologies they purport to combat. When legitimate concerns about demographic change, cultural cohesion, and the boundaries of political community are preemptively dismissed as elite manipulation or thinly veiled xenophobia, they are not thereby resolved; they are merely driven underground, where they fester and re-emerge in less productive, often genuinely populist and xenophobic forms. The refusal to engage seriously with the structural complexities of small-state migration—the insistence on treating all skepticism as bad faith—creates the conditions for precisely the democratic breakdown and social fragmentation that thoughtful critics rightly fear. If we wish to resist populism and xenophobia, we must first resist the temptation to caricature the real tensions these societies face, and the real anxieties their citizens experience, as mere manifestations of elite control. Honest engagement with complexity, not rhetorical simplification, is the only viable path forward.
Without gatekeeping and cultural elites in the 20th century, we would still have public hangings and the criminalisation of sodomy. The fact that most of what passes as "democratic theory" cannot handle this basic fact is a large part of the reason why I have stayed clear of democratic theory for most of my career.
Surprised to not see 'Democracy for Realists' mentioned here. I haven't been able to read it, but I listened to a good Dutch language podcast episode about it.
Here a summary by ChatGPT:
---
Main points:
1. Rejection of the “folk theory” of democracy:
The authors argue that the traditional view — that citizens make rational policy choices, elect representatives who reflect these preferences, and thereby steer government — is empirically false. Voters lack stable, coherent policy preferences and are poorly informed about political realities.
2. Group and identity-based voting:
Instead of ideological or policy-driven decision-making, voting is largely determined by social identities and group loyalties. People support parties as expressions of who they are (e.g., class, religion, race), not because they rationally evaluate policies.
3. Retrospective performance evaluation is flawed:
The “retrospective voting” model (punishing or rewarding incumbents for performance) also fails in practice. Voters react to short-term or irrelevant factors (e.g., local sports victories, weather, or shark attacks) rather than meaningful governance outcomes.
4. Implications for democratic theory:
Since citizen input is structured by identity and circumstance rather than rational deliberation, democratic accountability is limited. Real democracy functions more as group competition mediated by elites than as popular control of policy.
5. “Realist” model of democracy:
The authors propose a more sociological and realistic understanding: democracy works (to the extent it does) through party systems that organize and aggregate group interests, not through informed individual choice. Elites matter; voters mainly choose among pre-shaped identities and narratives.
Briefly pushing back against #2, partly because the book has been influential.
Several papers (published after the book) suggest many voters care about policy congruence and responsiveness from their elected officials. This focus on issues is not merely a consequence of group identity; in fact, learning a group's policy positions can actively shape a voter's feelings toward that group, indicating that policy is a foundational element of political evaluations.
Some good work:
Clifford, Scott, Elizabeth Simas, and JeongKyu Suh. 2024. “The Policy Basis of Group Sentiments.” Political Science Research and Methods.
Costa, Mia. 2021. “Ideology, Not Affect: What Americans Want from Political Representation.” American Journal of Political Science 65(2): 342–58.
Huh, I thought a weaker point was 3: the lack of famines in democracies seems like pretty clear evidence of *some sort* of responsiveness, and the followup work done seems to mostly validate the idea that, at the very least, politicians act like voters will care about what happened.
Good piece. The ecosystem is so very male, or rather, incentivizes a certain brashness and overstatement rather than thoughtfulness. (Even the recent CBS purchase demonstrates this.) It needs to be said that all the owners of all the social media platforms are men. That all the major podcasters are men. The vast majority of the major voices even here on substack are largely men. Your bibliography is most men. That's fine, but it must be said that social media replicates the old newsroom biases. An observation not a criticism.
Fair point. But … Candace Owens, Laura Loomer, Megyn Kelly, MTG? Seems like there are a fair number of entrepreneurial women who are taking advantage of the decline of the gatekeepers and who aren’t reluctant to brashly overstate.
How would it be different if it was all women? Just a thought experiment, I'm not looking for an argument...but I wonder how, or even if, it would be different...(?)
Sure...you noted "all" relative to podcasters and platform ownership, and "most" for the rest of it. I'm curious about "all", but if "most" allows you latitude...sure, do "most".
Who knows? I am not a sociologist. But one cannot escape noticing patterns in ownership of social media platforms and the major podcasts on current events. And ownership patterns mean networks and amplification of those in network. Set theory and network theory seem more important here than sociology.
Per patterns... I'm an olde guy, retired, had my share of interactions with high power corporate types (and don't care much anymore), and I've not found any particular difference between men and the (few) women that found their way up. Talent, competence, decision making, venality, lying, backstabbing, etc.... Both men and women are adept.
If Set Theory and Network theory are more important, why make the sociological pattern observations in your post?
I cannot unsee patterns. I applaud your not seeing gender differences. Sadly you are in a small set. I was also partly continuing a conversation I began on another platform. https://x.com/anecdotal/status/1974974390581580178
I'm not sure I agree that in the print era it was the elite that were gatekeepers. The gatekeeper then was critical thought. You are forced to flesh out your ideas in print. Imagine reading a Trump speech? You couldn't. It would make no sense.
Social media, posts, short clips that are highly edited by your followers allow the viral distribution of slogans like "make America great again" . Then folks rally around these slogans and they shape voting and world view absent of any truth or credibility.
No one reads anymore, no one thinks anymore. And everyone thinks they are well informed after doom scrolling FB and Twitter.
Dems such at social media vitality so they can't play the game. Trump is incredible at it.
We are in trouble. Our only saving grace is that there are term limits for presidents....for now.
Good — the medium is a big part of the message. Substack is social media, but the primitives are long text posts instead of videos or tweets.
TV and radio both shifted the contours of discourse. It’s taking a while for social norms and stigma to emerge around expressing one’s politics on social media
This is part of my model: if it cost two hours of time, in addition to any time thinking or drafting, to post something on social media about politics, I would expect to see a dramatically different world.
This is what happens when we sloganize a word like "democracy." We support it uncritically, pushing for "more democracy," not remembering that we have always struck a balance between popular and expert opinion.
So then people like Fukuyama can't imagine that too much democracy is a problem. He declares "The End of History" when democracies win, even though we still have ahead of us the hard work of balancing against populism and the tyranny of the masses.
We are getting democracy good and hard, and we should be thinking about what sorts of new protections we need from it, now that it has new sources of destabilizing power.
Provocative thesis Mr. Plato. It generates too many responses in me for a short comment, but here are 3.
1. I'd rather have democracy good and hard than authoritarianism good and hard although your argument suggests that the first inevitably leads to the second.
2. Even if I grant that your argument is correct, we can't put Pandora back in the box. The misinfo activists -- who are trying to herd the public back into the barn and rebuild the gates so that the gatekeepers can keep them in line -- are wasting their time and misdirecting the efforts of liberals. The only current alternative to some form of good and hard authoritarianism is to persuade enough of the public that liberalism actually is pretty good for them, especially when compared to the alternatives. That's hard to do if you start with the assumption that most people are incapable of coherent political thought.
3. The "revolt of the public" thesis reminds me of a persuasive argument about the fall of Eastern European communist governments. Those governments were overwhelmingly unpopular and incapable of resisting a popular revolt. But, due to the government's control of communication channels, the public had a coordination problem. No one really knew how many other people also hated the government and would support protests. Once the spell was broken, and it was safe for subjects to express their true opinions, the governments fell quickly.
Your argument suggests that liberal democratic governments that opposed the communists are now facing a similar revolt. The liberal control over communication channels was softer, exercised through gatekeepers who limited what could be shared via mass communication. But it still created a coordination problem for the majority who hate the condescension of the meritocratic elite, but didn't know how widespread disdain of the elites was until social media made it easier to avoid the gatekeepers and share their actual opinions.
Not sure what to do with number 3, but it is interesting.
> I'd rather have democracy good and hard than authoritarianism good and hard
Likely we'll get both. There's a long history of "electing a dictator" both in US local politics and authoritarian states around the world. What's really tricky is avoiding "tyranny of the majority", preventing the masses from electing a leader who will enforce a preference of the masses when that preference is contrary to a sanctified concept of liberty -- such as being a member of an unpopular religion, or having unpopular sexual tastes.
Typing on my phone so I cant really back up my claim but we know from social science and disinformation resrarch that people are not simply making free choices they couldnt previously express due to "elites" but are being manioulated by targeted campaigns ran by certain geopolitical actors and billionaires. If I have time later I can cite various sources.
Humans are surprisingly suggestible so I think this positive feedback phenomenon does exist. Presumably what gets amplified is content neutral but perhaps not. Maybe there are evolutionary predispositions that require a lot of conscientiousness and executive control to override.
Does Fox News just fulfill a demand or does it also help create demand by rallying money and institutions around a worldview?
Dan, I still wonder if the new media landscape is analogous to the problem of evolutionary mismatch and junk food. This theory does seem to align with your framing but also with the theory that the abundance of junk information is displacing better information in a complex bidirectional feedback system.
You can even stretch the analogy a little further: Not only has the content of information gotten worse and displaced better information, the form of the information has also been detrimental to the digestive process (by undermining focus and memory).
Sure, there are some targeted campaigns. But is there any reason to think these targeted campaigns are as effective as the targeted campaigns run on legacy media, known as advertisements, or public service announcements?
This just comes off as a different kind of conspiracy. Rival actors have been spreading propaganda amongst the populace to mild effect long before social media. And the wealthy had more impact on gatekeeping information before social media or even Rupert Murdoch. Hearst still has a castle standing in California, and a war he manufactured in the history books. The liberal belief that more democracy equals more liberalism is wrong, where we go from that acknowledgement is up to the reader.
People tend to prefer connecting with others who hold more politically extreme views than themselves, a preference called "acrophily." This results in extreme profiles being followed back more often and receiving more engagement such as retweets compared to moderate ones within political groups. Extreme users are also rated as more confident, interesting, intelligent, and coherent, making them appear more appealing as representatives of the group.
In other words, social media *definitely* has a polarizing effect. It does *not* only reveal a populist sentiment that already exists among the masses. It amplifies it and worsens it.
Yeah, I don’t think his analysis of what platforms do to discourse was sufficiently rigorous.
Ofc it is true that, to a large extent, they just expose the incoherence and stupidity that was there all along. But different design choices can amplify or dull those forces.
Where is the data to support your central argument? “Most people” are represented in a “democratic” media? These arguments rest on several faulty assumptions and pre existing prejudices—all divorced from any standard of proof. If you are going to argue that social media algorithms accurately represent the views of the majority you need data to back it up. Or you end up with the wild and disproportionate claims that follow from such a flawed assumption. If you can’t distinguish between democracy (rules based elections, collective processes evolved over centuries) and demotics (what some random people feel like posting today in a fit of pique) it would be helpful to know why. We know that a tiny minority of people drive all political content on all the platforms. If you have data that proves otherwise we need to see it—or you are simply repeating assumptions that a tiny percentage of nut jobs really are representative of “most people” and that sounding off in a rage is the same thing as casting a vote in elections. Social media platforms are not democratic. Not even close. They are not a reliable feedback loop or even a representative sample. Interpreting them as such leads to the confused and contradictory statements that pepper this article.
Except all the evidence is that social media perpetuates and accelerates more extreme content and views. It is not entirely to blame but it is an accelerant and the landscape is titled to illiberal outcomes. A tik tok video cannot make you vote AfD but it can normalise positions that were once fringe
Great essay. Its title takes me back to a previous essay of my own: Everyone Has lost Control of the Digital Age:
A ‘Culture of Narcissism’? Older readers may have grown up with the remnants of a Christian moral sense that everyone (including oneself) is an imperfect being. In the following decades, that moral/philosophical centre ‘progressively’ unravelled. Key to this was the entry into the Western collective psyche of a supposed deficit of self-love … one that needed correcting via maximal self-esteem. In the post-60s decades, self-esteem’s supposed importance to healthy personal development became axiomatic right across the spectrum from Left to Right. But it had a downside. Once you are encouraged to view yourself as axiomatically personally blameless, the next step is to look for someone (or something) else to blame for your discontents. Re-cast your wonderful self as a ‘victim’….. of something or other. To put all this in a nutshell: Wokeness is not Marxism in extremis, it is Liberal Individualism in extremis. It could well be that the current Trumpist revolution is necessary medicine and who knows what course-correction it might achieve on the good ship Western Liberalism. Trusting in the democratically expressed wisdom of the electorate is, after all, the philosophical keystone on which Liberalism is founded. Even if in darker moments one might wonder whether – in the withering words of H L Menchen: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.’ https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/everyone-has-lost-control-of-the
I believe this takes a very wrong turn about here: "By removing barriers to entry and the influence of elite gatekeepers, they radically democratised the public sphere."
Excuse me for a moment: ELON MUSK IS THE RICHEST PERSON IN THE WORLD! He is *AN ELITE* - of elites - by any but the most tortured definitions. And that's just one example.
The public sphere has not been "democratised". Instead, civic institutions have been destroyed, in favor of strengthening the influence of propagandists (sigh - Internet necessity - what didn't I say? I didn't say "Propagandists never existed before the Internet, or in previous media". The word I used was *strengthening*, as in existed before but now have greater power). This isn't a technological determinism claim for social media. Rather, that's one part of a very big story, and shouldn't be considered in isolation from very deliberate decisions to deform the public sphere.
A key problem is an implicit restriction of "elites" to apparently mean something like "some concern about facts", rather than more at political power. Thus, public health officials will then count as "elites", but right-wing anti-vax lunatics won't count as "elites", even if they're Secretary Of Health and come from a family political dynasty.
I was around for the first wave of Social Media evangelism, and got slammed for repeatedly pointing out that the "No Gatekeepers" slogan was just different and far worse gatekeepers. Which I suppose is sort of self-proving the uselessness of making that point.
From an outside perspective though, it appears more like Elon acts more like one of the herd than an opinion maker. He and the President spend too much time on social media and change their actions to follow the conspiracy of the day rather than using their wealth and power to manipulate public opinion. They do also try to do the latter, but its all rather clumsy.
"Elite" is a strange word, and here its clearly being used as "Liberal intelligentsia" which helps to leave wealth out of the equation. The intelligentsia of the west is largely struggling with this issue of democratizing information bringing illiberal thought to the forefront of politics. Elon Musk is much less of a gatekeeper of information than the old bosses of TV stations and NYT editors. His wealth has little impact on the fact that the information on X is more open to the public than the front page of the Washington Post.
Another notable point to this is that many of those right wing elites have pretty clearly changed their views over time rather than simply revealed existing beliefs. This is especially stark in the tech right like Elon and Marc Andreesen who's online content and demeanor changed over the last 5-10 years from being pretty normal center-ish business personalities to erratic right wing radicals spouting about Great Replacement Theory. I don't think social media explains that entire shift and I'm sure there was some existing foundation for those beliefs, but it's also hard to ignore how stark the change was amid a clear addiction to these platforms.
Elon's kid got transed.
James Damore got sacked for arguing the white men who build Silicon Valley shouldn't be discriminated against.
The other major Silicon Valley group, Jews, watched the left celebrate Oct 7th.
COVID NPIs were statistically bonkers (and most smart tech people can do statistics) and California is where they were the worst in the country.
At some point you just got to admit the left went bonkers crazy after 2020 and that Silicon Valley people had to experience it in personal ways.
Elon is a bit different, but you can explain the rightward turn of tech industry without reference to actual right wing politics. When the activist base of the party you’ve always supported decides to demonize everything from how you transport your employees to the supposed effects of your product on society and sets up the FTC to go after your, you’re likely to be disaffected. I don’t agree with Zuckerberg or Andrewsen about this. My first rule of politics is I don’t support people who attempted a coup. But I don’t find their choice terribly surprising
Elon Musk lasted a few months in the Trump admin and accomplished nothing. He's now persona non-grata amongst both the right and the left.
The signature issue he ruptured with the right on, H1Bs, ended up being decided in favor of the people he said he would "rip the faces off of". The cap hasn't been increased, there is $100,000 visa fee, and the lottery has been replaced with salary prioritization.
He couldn't even get his EV credits to stick for his cars.
Some elite.
To the extent he had views that were broadly shared by the median voter (say on trans issues) they got implemented anyway.
A sign someone or some institution is "elite" is that they can get policy to differ from the median voters preferences. We've got a SALT deduction in the OBBB not because the median voter wants it, but because elites in blue states want it. We had affirmative action forever not because it ever won a referendum, but because the elites wanted it. Trans, open borders, etc.
Trump's around because there are a lot of issues where the elite has tried to ram through things the median voter hates, and so he can position himself in the meaty part of a bunch of 60/40, 70/30, 80/20 issues and people care more about that then his particular personality flaws.
That doesn’t really stand up to examination, though. If you look across social media forums, places where there’s less gate keeping are more populist. That goes for everything from the various incarnations of Facebook to X versus Twitter to Reddit in the days where r/TheDonald was allowed to run riot to the depths of 4chan or whatever it calls itself now. You can protest with some justices that social media companies aren’t ever truly content neutral, but generally when they’ve had their thumb on the scale it’s been against populism, not for it.
Yes, something had changed and I think you’re right that the shift to engagement based feeds is a big part of it. But my point was that direct editorial control doesn’t seem to have much to do with it. For the most part, less control has meant more right wing populist content. It’s not because some conspiracy of tech billionaires is manipulating the content moderation to serve their own political interests. It’s that people engage more with right wing populist content. I don’t think we understand that terribly well, but it does seem to be the case.
There are two interesting counterpoints. First of course Elon has deliberately skewed moderation on X to favor material that supports his own politics. But for the most part those efforts seem to be just as transparent and ham fisted as Twitters earlier efforts to be socially responsible. For the most part the people controlling these platforms are just rising the tiger.
Second, BlueSky doesn’t have any overall editorial control, but of course it’s almost comically woke. The mean BlueSky poster seems to think the best way to overthrow fascism is to try to cancel Matt Yglesias. So unlike other sites they’re not preferentially engaging with right populist content but with equally insane progressive rabble rousing. I would guess this is to do with the seed user base at BlueSky, but I don’t know.
Elon Musk's views are obviously not typical of the elite.
Exactly. We are entering an age of techno-oligarchic-authoritarianism. The old elite gatekeepers are dead. Hello to the new elite gatekeepers.
I think you’re right that social media didn’t corrupt democracy so much as expose it for what it was. But it doesn’t stop there. Once reflection became measurable, it became reflexive: the crowd trains the algorithm, and the algorithm trains the crowd. The mirror turns into a feedback loop. What began as democratization evolves into conditioning—the system teaching us what to want next.
“where the MAGA coalition has evolved into a highly authoritarian, extremely corrupt political movement…”
MAGA learned to fight liberal tyranny with more than words , as far as debate “peace has been murdered and dialogue shot in the throat.”
On the other hand your faction has Proved Him Wrong, Charlie Kirk.
Thank You.
These terms are acceptable.
We aren’t here long enough to be corrupt, a word the left now tosses like fascist, racist, etc.
perhaps you mean we can’t be bought? That must be disconcerting.
How a Liberal can say authoritarian or corrupt without choking is beyond me.
You are correct however that movements of the people are overthrowing the Liberal order all over the world. Ireland for instance, England, the Czechs if they’re allowed to vote and not thrown in jail, Hungary, Brazil if the opposition wasn’t in jail… Moldova if the opposition wasn’t in jail…
…. Indeed democracy is bad for Liberals.
In America Trump is proceeding lawfully, something he’ll likely regret, but Trump is holding back the tide… of most of the rest of us.
Perhaps you’ll always have Venezuela… or perhaps not.
Good article. I’ve had many of these thoughts for years but you’ve articulated them more clearly. Maybe rule by elites tempered by noblesse oblige or a Christian morality wasn’t so bad after all.
This line of thinking does lead one to some dark places though: delusions of grandeur or arrogance for one (well _I’m_ not one of these dumb voters), or even more scary, an almost Yarvin-like questioning of democracy itself. If my fellow citizens are such idiots, and infinite zero-cost communications empowers them all, how are we to organize and meet the real challenges we have as a species (eg climate change)?
Of course this is the arrogance of the Professional Managerial Class left that spent 2007-2022 or so ignoring democratic will and getting power via the levers of bureaucracy, academia, etc. which helped provoke the current backlash.
It’s funny/ironic how all our early optimism about the internet failed to recognize just how dumb (or short-sighted, high “time preference” as they say) many of our fellow homo sapiens are. The early internet evangelists didn’t know that, precisely because of elite control of popular discourse!
That last observation has been true for every new mass media - books, newspapers, radio, tv ..
**Williams is right about the algorithm scapegoating—but his dichotomy is too simple**
Williams makes a compelling case that blaming algorithms for our political dysfunction is largely cope. I’m persuaded by his core argument: social media hasn’t manipulated “good” people into “bad” beliefs so much as it has revealed popular opinions that elite gatekeeping previously suppressed.
However, I think his framing—elite gatekeeping vs. unfiltered democracy—overlooks a crucial third dimension: **the institutional quality of democratic mediation**.
Not all democracies are created equal. Consider the distinction between representative systems where voters elect parties that promise simplified solutions in emotionally charged campaigns versus direct democratic systems—Switzerland being the paradigmatic example—where citizens vote on specific policy questions after structured public debate.
In Swiss-style direct democracy, proponents must articulate their positions with precision. Citizens engage with actual policy details rather than tribal signaling. The epistemic demands are higher—and this institutional architecture often produces more sophisticated outcomes than representative systems where professional politicians may themselves lack deep subject-matter expertise.
This matters because Williams treats “elites” as a functionally homogeneous category. But there’s a vast difference between:
- Domain experts with genuine technical competence
- Professional politicians whose primary skill is campaigning
- Symbolic political actors who’ve moved directly from university into political office
**Which elites are we defending?**
Here’s where my own experience becomes uncomfortably relevant. I live in a very small, highly international European country where local history risks being displaced rather than complemented by imported narratives of suffering and resistance.
We have streets named after international civil rights figures with no connection to our local history, while local resistance heroes—steelworkers who launched general strikes against fascism and were executed for it—remain uncommemorated. The small memorial to the boys who died in narrow mining shafts during our industrial revolution is unknown even to highly educated progressive friends and relatives.
I want to be clear: I’m not arguing against honoring figures like Ruby Bridges. I’m pointing to a problematic **displacement** of local memory—and more importantly, to the **impossibility of discussing this openly** without immediate accusations of xenophobia or worse.
**This is precisely where Williams’ analysis becomes complicated.** If legitimate concerns about the erasure of local working-class history cannot be articulated by educated elites without triggering moral panic, where do those concerns go? They don’t disappear. They migrate to spaces where they *will* be articulated—often by actors who genuinely *are* xenophobic, who instrumentalize legitimate grievances for illegitimate ends.
In other words: elite gatekeeping doesn’t just suppress “dangerous” ideas. It can also suppress *legitimate* concerns, thereby ensuring those concerns become associated with dangerous movements. The taboo becomes self-fulfilling.
This dynamic seems particularly relevant in a context where two-thirds of residents are non-citizens and over a hundred nationalities share political space. The accusation of xenophobia is empirically absurd here—yet it remains the immediate response to any questioning of how international narratives relate to local memory.
**Williams is right that social media reveals popular frustrations that elites previously suppressed. But he doesn’t adequately address whether those suppressions were always epistemically justified, or whether some were ideologically convenient silencings that created the very resentments now amplifying right-wing populism.**
Beyond symbolic politics, I observe other patterns that complicate Williams’ defense of elite competence: bicycle infrastructure installed by subdividing sidewalks and streets in areas where cycling rates remain minimal, worsening existing traffic problems. Now, I recognize this could reflect my own biases—perhaps the infrastructure will catalyze behavioral change over time. Perhaps I’m selecting examples that confirm my frustrations.
**But here’s my point**: If Williams is correct that elite gatekeeping had genuine epistemic value, shouldn’t we be able to point to evidence of superior elite competence? What I observe suggests that contemporary political elites often lack both the technical expertise and the local knowledge that might justify their gatekeeping role.
This isn’t a partisan critique. It’s a question about **institutional competence** that cuts across ideological lines. Williams’ analysis would be stronger if he distinguished between:
- Elites with domain expertise excluding genuinely harmful ideas
- Elites with ideological commitments excluding inconvenient realities
- Elites with professional incompetence making poor decisions
**The uncomfortable alternative**
Williams suggests that perhaps “democracy can’t survive too much democracy.” I’d propose a different formulation: perhaps democracy can’t survive **poor institutional design**, regardless of how much public participation it involves.
Swiss-style direct democracy isn’t simply “more democracy”—it’s *differently structured* democracy, with institutional mechanisms that enforce higher epistemic standards than many representative systems currently achieve.
This doesn’t resolve Williams’ core concern about the dangers of populism. But it suggests that the problem might not be “too much democracy” versus “necessary elite gatekeeping,” but rather the quality of the institutional architecture that mediates between public opinion and policy outcomes.
The troubling question becomes: If our political elites are increasingly selected for symbolic rather than substantive competence, aren’t we getting the worst of both worlds—neither genuine expertise nor genuine popular sovereignty?
I don’t have a clean answer. But I suspect Williams’ dichotomy, while more honest than the algorithm-scapegoating he criticizes, still doesn’t quite capture what’s gone wrong.
I found this comment incisive and a genuine supplement to the article. I wish I had the faculties to supply a plausible explanation of the rise in weak and/or incompetent, managerial-style leadership classes of the recent decades, then there might be a full thesis to digest.
Though Switzerland is a strange case as about 1/3 of Swiss *workers* aren't Swiss *citizens* (or so Google says) and guestworkers, rather than having permanent residence. And I'm sure the employment regulations generally give the citizens the best jobs. So a Swiss referendum is like a US election would be if the lowest income/status/and probably education 1/3 of the US population wasn't allowed to vote. That is, it would be heavily biased toward elites.
Part 1
**On Democratic Representation, Migration, and the Limits of Simple Analogies: A Response**
The critique of Swiss direct democracy as exhibiting “elite bias” rests on a superficially plausible but ultimately misleading analogy: that excluding non-citizens from the franchise is equivalent to disenfranchising the lowest-income, lowest-status third of a population. This comparison, however, founders on two fundamental misconceptions—one empirical, one conceptual—and ultimately projects the demographic and institutional logic of large federal states onto small European polities where entirely different structural dynamics prevail.
**I. The Empirical Error: Non-Citizens Are Not a Homogeneous Underclass**
The central empirical claim—that Swiss non-citizens constitute something akin to “the lowest income/status/and probably education” third of the workforce—is demonstrably false. Switzerland’s foreign resident population is *highly stratified*, encompassing both low-wage service workers and some of the most privileged professionals in Europe.
Consider the case of German nationals, who currently represent roughly 9% of Switzerland’s foreign population (approximately 323,600 individuals as of early 2024, the second-largest foreign group by numbers). This community is characterized by exceptionally high rates of educational attainment and professional qualification: many relocate to Switzerland for well-compensated positions in healthcare (particularly as physicians and dentists), engineering, education, and IT. Salaries for German professionals in Switzerland routinely exceed those in Germany by 60–70%, making Swiss employment financially attractive for temporary, high-earning migration.
Crucially, many of these individuals explicitly pursue *short- to medium-term migration strategies*—they come to accumulate savings and career credentials before returning home or moving onward. This “pendulum migration” dynamic is reflected in relatively low rates of Swiss naturalization among German nationals, minimal long-term local attachment, and strikingly low engagement in local political life, even where institutional pathways for participation exist. The pattern repeats, with variation, across other well-educated migrant groups.
This empirical reality fundamentally undermines the analogy to a disenfranchised American underclass. The non-citizen population in Switzerland is not uniformly disadvantaged; it includes substantial cohorts of individuals who enjoy higher incomes, greater professional status, and more transnational mobility than many Swiss citizens. To frame their exclusion from the franchise as automatically reflecting “elite bias” is to misread both the composition of the migrant population and the nature of political exclusion itself.
**II. The Conceptual Error: Citizenship Exclusion Is Not Elite Gatekeeping**
Even if non-citizens were, on average, economically disadvantaged (which, as shown, they are not uniformly), the exclusion of non-citizens from voting rights would not constitute “elite bias” in any straightforward sense. The critique conflates two distinct phenomena: *socioeconomic stratification* and *political membership criteria*.
Elite bias, properly understood, occurs when institutional design systematically privileges the interests or perspectives of a narrow ruling class *within an already-defined polity*. What the critique actually identifies, however, is something altogether different: the structural fact that nation-states define political membership through citizenship, and that citizenship acquisition is governed by criteria—residency duration, language proficiency, integration standards, and sometimes cultural or historical belonging—that are independent of income or social status.
This distinction becomes even more salient when we examine cases where formal political rights *have* been extended to non-citizens. Luxembourg’s experience is instructive: despite granting municipal voting rights to long-term foreign residents, participation rates among the largest foreign community (Portuguese nationals) remain persistently low—frequently below 20%. This evidences that formal enfranchisement does not automatically translate into active democratic participation, particularly where linguistic, social, and cultural barriers persist, and where migration remains transnationally oriented or temporary in character.
Furthermore—and this point is often elided in debates that assume migrants are uniformly “powerless”—transnational mobility and dual citizenship can confer *disproportionate* political influence. The case of Turkish nationals in Germany illustrates this vividly: members of the Turkish diaspora vote in Turkish national elections, often with significantly higher support for nationalist candidates (e.g., Erdoğan) than the domestic Turkish electorate, precisely because they are insulated from the direct economic consequences (inflation, unemployment) of those policies. Far from being politically marginalized, such populations can exercise electoral leverage in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously, shaping outcomes in ways unavailable to “rooted” citizens. This dynamic is further amplified by European Union electoral law, which grants EU citizens the right to vote in European Parliament elections both in their country of residence *and*, in some cases, their country of origin—creating layered participatory structures that privilege mobile, transnationally networked individuals.
**III. The Structural Incommensurability of Small States**
The critique’s reliance on a US analogy betrays a deeper failure to recognize how profoundly scale, demographic composition, and institutional context shape the stakes of political inclusion. The comparison between Switzerland (or Luxembourg) and the United States is not merely imperfect—it is *structurally incommensurable*.
In large federal republics, migration is geographically diffuse, and even substantial immigration affects local communities unevenly and gradually. In small, open European polities, by contrast, migration can rapidly alter the entire demographic and cultural fabric of society. In Luxembourg, foreign residents comprise over 50% of the population, and cross-border commuters from France, Belgium, and Germany—who work daily in Luxembourg but reside and pay taxes abroad—constitute an additional, politically invisible labor force without representation in *any* jurisdiction where their economic activity is concentrated.
This creates a trilemma that has no analogue in the United States: Should resident foreigners vote, despite having no long-term stake and often limited linguistic or cultural integration? Should cross-border commuters vote, despite not residing in the polity? Or should only citizens vote, even when they constitute a demographic minority? The 2015 Luxembourg referendum on extending national voting rights to long-term foreign residents resulted in an overwhelming “No” (nearly 80% opposed)—not merely from xenophobic reaction, but because the electorate perceived, rightly or wrongly, that extending rights to resident foreigners while excluding economically vital cross-border workers was incoherent and incomplete.
At such demographic tipping points, the question of *who constitutes the demos* ceases to be a matter of expanding an existing franchise and becomes instead a fundamental, and potentially unresolvable, question of collective identity, stakeholdership, and the very boundaries of political community. This is categorically different from debates over voter suppression or elite gatekeeping in established nation-states with clear demographic majorities.
Part 2
**IV. Conclusion: Beyond Simplistic Binaries**
The critique’s analogy to elite bias collapses once we recognize that Swiss (and Luxembourgish) non-citizens are neither uniformly disadvantaged nor uniformly excluded from political influence. High-earning professionals often choose *not* to naturalize or participate locally, prioritizing transnational mobility over rootedness. Dual citizens and transnationally mobile migrants sometimes wield *greater* political leverage than “native” citizens, voting in multiple jurisdictions without bearing the full consequences of their choices. And in small states where migration reaches transformative proportions, the calculus of representation transcends questions of inclusion or exclusion, implicating deeper tensions about the nature and sustainability of political community itself.
None of this is to deny that meaningful questions about integration, representation, and fairness arise in Switzerland and Luxembourg. But those questions cannot be resolved—or even properly understood—through analogies to the United States or through simplistic narratives of “elite” citizens versus “powerless” migrants. The realities are far more complex, the power dynamics far more multi-directional, and the institutional challenges far more structurally rooted than such binaries allow.
Democratic theory and practice must grapple with these complexities honestly: acknowledging the stratification among migrants, the agency conferred by transnational mobility, and the legitimacy crises that arise when the very definition of “the people” becomes unsettled. Only then can debates about citizenship, suffrage, and belonging move beyond misleading analogies toward constructive engagement with the real—and often deeply uncomfortable—questions these small European democracies face.
**A final caveat is necessary.** Reductive narratives that portray all non-citizens as victims of elite gatekeeping—however well-intentioned—ultimately risk exacerbating the very pathologies they purport to combat. When legitimate concerns about demographic change, cultural cohesion, and the boundaries of political community are preemptively dismissed as elite manipulation or thinly veiled xenophobia, they are not thereby resolved; they are merely driven underground, where they fester and re-emerge in less productive, often genuinely populist and xenophobic forms. The refusal to engage seriously with the structural complexities of small-state migration—the insistence on treating all skepticism as bad faith—creates the conditions for precisely the democratic breakdown and social fragmentation that thoughtful critics rightly fear. If we wish to resist populism and xenophobia, we must first resist the temptation to caricature the real tensions these societies face, and the real anxieties their citizens experience, as mere manifestations of elite control. Honest engagement with complexity, not rhetorical simplification, is the only viable path forward.
Without gatekeeping and cultural elites in the 20th century, we would still have public hangings and the criminalisation of sodomy. The fact that most of what passes as "democratic theory" cannot handle this basic fact is a large part of the reason why I have stayed clear of democratic theory for most of my career.
What is “democratic theory” as you imagine it?
There are perfectly coherent accounts of just liberal societies that combine elite cultural production + governance with popular representation.
Is your concern with views that unreflectively defer to popular opinions because they are what “the people” believe?
Surprised to not see 'Democracy for Realists' mentioned here. I haven't been able to read it, but I listened to a good Dutch language podcast episode about it.
Here a summary by ChatGPT:
---
Main points:
1. Rejection of the “folk theory” of democracy:
The authors argue that the traditional view — that citizens make rational policy choices, elect representatives who reflect these preferences, and thereby steer government — is empirically false. Voters lack stable, coherent policy preferences and are poorly informed about political realities.
2. Group and identity-based voting:
Instead of ideological or policy-driven decision-making, voting is largely determined by social identities and group loyalties. People support parties as expressions of who they are (e.g., class, religion, race), not because they rationally evaluate policies.
3. Retrospective performance evaluation is flawed:
The “retrospective voting” model (punishing or rewarding incumbents for performance) also fails in practice. Voters react to short-term or irrelevant factors (e.g., local sports victories, weather, or shark attacks) rather than meaningful governance outcomes.
4. Implications for democratic theory:
Since citizen input is structured by identity and circumstance rather than rational deliberation, democratic accountability is limited. Real democracy functions more as group competition mediated by elites than as popular control of policy.
5. “Realist” model of democracy:
The authors propose a more sociological and realistic understanding: democracy works (to the extent it does) through party systems that organize and aggregate group interests, not through informed individual choice. Elites matter; voters mainly choose among pre-shaped identities and narratives.
Thanks. I like the book. I cite other (IMO superior) "realist" analyses of democracy that long precede it and that they draw on.
Fair enough!
Briefly pushing back against #2, partly because the book has been influential.
Several papers (published after the book) suggest many voters care about policy congruence and responsiveness from their elected officials. This focus on issues is not merely a consequence of group identity; in fact, learning a group's policy positions can actively shape a voter's feelings toward that group, indicating that policy is a foundational element of political evaluations.
Some good work:
Clifford, Scott, Elizabeth Simas, and JeongKyu Suh. 2024. “The Policy Basis of Group Sentiments.” Political Science Research and Methods.
Costa, Mia. 2021. “Ideology, Not Affect: What Americans Want from Political Representation.” American Journal of Political Science 65(2): 342–58.
Simas, Elizabeth N. 2023. In Defense of Ideology: Reexamining the Role of Ideology in the American Electorate. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/9781009228169/type/element
Huh, I thought a weaker point was 3: the lack of famines in democracies seems like pretty clear evidence of *some sort* of responsiveness, and the followup work done seems to mostly validate the idea that, at the very least, politicians act like voters will care about what happened.
Good piece. The ecosystem is so very male, or rather, incentivizes a certain brashness and overstatement rather than thoughtfulness. (Even the recent CBS purchase demonstrates this.) It needs to be said that all the owners of all the social media platforms are men. That all the major podcasters are men. The vast majority of the major voices even here on substack are largely men. Your bibliography is most men. That's fine, but it must be said that social media replicates the old newsroom biases. An observation not a criticism.
Fair point. But … Candace Owens, Laura Loomer, Megyn Kelly, MTG? Seems like there are a fair number of entrepreneurial women who are taking advantage of the decline of the gatekeepers and who aren’t reluctant to brashly overstate.
Who are they? What turnpikes do they control?
Thanks - and yes, fair points.
Excellent points.
How would it be different if it was all women? Just a thought experiment, I'm not looking for an argument...but I wonder how, or even if, it would be different...(?)
All?
Sure...you noted "all" relative to podcasters and platform ownership, and "most" for the rest of it. I'm curious about "all", but if "most" allows you latitude...sure, do "most".
Who knows? I am not a sociologist. But one cannot escape noticing patterns in ownership of social media platforms and the major podcasts on current events. And ownership patterns mean networks and amplification of those in network. Set theory and network theory seem more important here than sociology.
Exactly. Who knows? Not me.
Per patterns... I'm an olde guy, retired, had my share of interactions with high power corporate types (and don't care much anymore), and I've not found any particular difference between men and the (few) women that found their way up. Talent, competence, decision making, venality, lying, backstabbing, etc.... Both men and women are adept.
If Set Theory and Network theory are more important, why make the sociological pattern observations in your post?
I cannot unsee patterns. I applaud your not seeing gender differences. Sadly you are in a small set. I was also partly continuing a conversation I began on another platform. https://x.com/anecdotal/status/1974974390581580178
I'm not sure I agree that in the print era it was the elite that were gatekeepers. The gatekeeper then was critical thought. You are forced to flesh out your ideas in print. Imagine reading a Trump speech? You couldn't. It would make no sense.
Social media, posts, short clips that are highly edited by your followers allow the viral distribution of slogans like "make America great again" . Then folks rally around these slogans and they shape voting and world view absent of any truth or credibility.
No one reads anymore, no one thinks anymore. And everyone thinks they are well informed after doom scrolling FB and Twitter.
Dems such at social media vitality so they can't play the game. Trump is incredible at it.
We are in trouble. Our only saving grace is that there are term limits for presidents....for now.
Good — the medium is a big part of the message. Substack is social media, but the primitives are long text posts instead of videos or tweets.
TV and radio both shifted the contours of discourse. It’s taking a while for social norms and stigma to emerge around expressing one’s politics on social media
This is part of my model: if it cost two hours of time, in addition to any time thinking or drafting, to post something on social media about politics, I would expect to see a dramatically different world.
This is what happens when we sloganize a word like "democracy." We support it uncritically, pushing for "more democracy," not remembering that we have always struck a balance between popular and expert opinion.
So then people like Fukuyama can't imagine that too much democracy is a problem. He declares "The End of History" when democracies win, even though we still have ahead of us the hard work of balancing against populism and the tyranny of the masses.
We are getting democracy good and hard, and we should be thinking about what sorts of new protections we need from it, now that it has new sources of destabilizing power.
Provocative thesis Mr. Plato. It generates too many responses in me for a short comment, but here are 3.
1. I'd rather have democracy good and hard than authoritarianism good and hard although your argument suggests that the first inevitably leads to the second.
2. Even if I grant that your argument is correct, we can't put Pandora back in the box. The misinfo activists -- who are trying to herd the public back into the barn and rebuild the gates so that the gatekeepers can keep them in line -- are wasting their time and misdirecting the efforts of liberals. The only current alternative to some form of good and hard authoritarianism is to persuade enough of the public that liberalism actually is pretty good for them, especially when compared to the alternatives. That's hard to do if you start with the assumption that most people are incapable of coherent political thought.
3. The "revolt of the public" thesis reminds me of a persuasive argument about the fall of Eastern European communist governments. Those governments were overwhelmingly unpopular and incapable of resisting a popular revolt. But, due to the government's control of communication channels, the public had a coordination problem. No one really knew how many other people also hated the government and would support protests. Once the spell was broken, and it was safe for subjects to express their true opinions, the governments fell quickly.
Your argument suggests that liberal democratic governments that opposed the communists are now facing a similar revolt. The liberal control over communication channels was softer, exercised through gatekeepers who limited what could be shared via mass communication. But it still created a coordination problem for the majority who hate the condescension of the meritocratic elite, but didn't know how widespread disdain of the elites was until social media made it easier to avoid the gatekeepers and share their actual opinions.
Not sure what to do with number 3, but it is interesting.
> I'd rather have democracy good and hard than authoritarianism good and hard
Likely we'll get both. There's a long history of "electing a dictator" both in US local politics and authoritarian states around the world. What's really tricky is avoiding "tyranny of the majority", preventing the masses from electing a leader who will enforce a preference of the masses when that preference is contrary to a sanctified concept of liberty -- such as being a member of an unpopular religion, or having unpopular sexual tastes.
Typing on my phone so I cant really back up my claim but we know from social science and disinformation resrarch that people are not simply making free choices they couldnt previously express due to "elites" but are being manioulated by targeted campaigns ran by certain geopolitical actors and billionaires. If I have time later I can cite various sources.
Humans are surprisingly suggestible so I think this positive feedback phenomenon does exist. Presumably what gets amplified is content neutral but perhaps not. Maybe there are evolutionary predispositions that require a lot of conscientiousness and executive control to override.
Does Fox News just fulfill a demand or does it also help create demand by rallying money and institutions around a worldview?
Evidence Ive seen suggests a significant right wing bias in amplified content, going back decades
Dan, I still wonder if the new media landscape is analogous to the problem of evolutionary mismatch and junk food. This theory does seem to align with your framing but also with the theory that the abundance of junk information is displacing better information in a complex bidirectional feedback system.
What do you think?
You can even stretch the analogy a little further: Not only has the content of information gotten worse and displaced better information, the form of the information has also been detrimental to the digestive process (by undermining focus and memory).
Sure, there are some targeted campaigns. But is there any reason to think these targeted campaigns are as effective as the targeted campaigns run on legacy media, known as advertisements, or public service announcements?
Yes, just cant link right now
This just comes off as a different kind of conspiracy. Rival actors have been spreading propaganda amongst the populace to mild effect long before social media. And the wealthy had more impact on gatekeeping information before social media or even Rupert Murdoch. Hearst still has a castle standing in California, and a war he manufactured in the history books. The liberal belief that more democracy equals more liberalism is wrong, where we go from that acknowledgement is up to the reader.
The effects werent as profound due to the time spent on the medium and the interaction mechanisms. Again, well researched in behavioural psych.
People tend to prefer connecting with others who hold more politically extreme views than themselves, a preference called "acrophily." This results in extreme profiles being followed back more often and receiving more engagement such as retweets compared to moderate ones within political groups. Extreme users are also rated as more confident, interesting, intelligent, and coherent, making them appear more appealing as representatives of the group.
In other words, social media *definitely* has a polarizing effect. It does *not* only reveal a populist sentiment that already exists among the masses. It amplifies it and worsens it.
Yeah, I don’t think his analysis of what platforms do to discourse was sufficiently rigorous.
Ofc it is true that, to a large extent, they just expose the incoherence and stupidity that was there all along. But different design choices can amplify or dull those forces.
Where is the data to support your central argument? “Most people” are represented in a “democratic” media? These arguments rest on several faulty assumptions and pre existing prejudices—all divorced from any standard of proof. If you are going to argue that social media algorithms accurately represent the views of the majority you need data to back it up. Or you end up with the wild and disproportionate claims that follow from such a flawed assumption. If you can’t distinguish between democracy (rules based elections, collective processes evolved over centuries) and demotics (what some random people feel like posting today in a fit of pique) it would be helpful to know why. We know that a tiny minority of people drive all political content on all the platforms. If you have data that proves otherwise we need to see it—or you are simply repeating assumptions that a tiny percentage of nut jobs really are representative of “most people” and that sounding off in a rage is the same thing as casting a vote in elections. Social media platforms are not democratic. Not even close. They are not a reliable feedback loop or even a representative sample. Interpreting them as such leads to the confused and contradictory statements that pepper this article.
Except all the evidence is that social media perpetuates and accelerates more extreme content and views. It is not entirely to blame but it is an accelerant and the landscape is titled to illiberal outcomes. A tik tok video cannot make you vote AfD but it can normalise positions that were once fringe
https://globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/x-and-tiktok-algorithms-push-pro-afd-content-to-non-partisan-german-users-new-analysis/
Great essay. Its title takes me back to a previous essay of my own: Everyone Has lost Control of the Digital Age:
A ‘Culture of Narcissism’? Older readers may have grown up with the remnants of a Christian moral sense that everyone (including oneself) is an imperfect being. In the following decades, that moral/philosophical centre ‘progressively’ unravelled. Key to this was the entry into the Western collective psyche of a supposed deficit of self-love … one that needed correcting via maximal self-esteem. In the post-60s decades, self-esteem’s supposed importance to healthy personal development became axiomatic right across the spectrum from Left to Right. But it had a downside. Once you are encouraged to view yourself as axiomatically personally blameless, the next step is to look for someone (or something) else to blame for your discontents. Re-cast your wonderful self as a ‘victim’….. of something or other. To put all this in a nutshell: Wokeness is not Marxism in extremis, it is Liberal Individualism in extremis. It could well be that the current Trumpist revolution is necessary medicine and who knows what course-correction it might achieve on the good ship Western Liberalism. Trusting in the democratically expressed wisdom of the electorate is, after all, the philosophical keystone on which Liberalism is founded. Even if in darker moments one might wonder whether – in the withering words of H L Menchen: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.’ https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/everyone-has-lost-control-of-the
And part of this was a humility that led people to not so loudly bang on about their opinions to all and sundry out of modesty.
Democracy needs unpolluted streams of information like nature needs unpolluted rivers and our bodies need unpolluted blood. Otherwise it dies.