Cold War Daily

I had the opportunity to speak with Ron Steslow of the Politicology podcast, along with fellow guest information war expert Molly McKew about the state of democracy broadly in this fractured world. It was a conversation about the effects of propaganda and influence campaigns on American democracy in particular, and liberal democracy in general.

We discussed the “democratic mind” – an idea akin to Dr Gordon Allport’s views on the “democratic personality.” Allport was a founding figure in the psychology of personality. In a 1951 speech Allport described followers of Hitler and Stalin as having their “backbone outside”, essentially their need for order and guidance imposed upon the individual. “Only with [sic] greatest difficulty does a democratic personality get the backbone on the inside…” he said.

Amid today’s networked society, the democratic mind, if one does exist, would be interconnected with its peers, like anyone else’s. But it would be able to filter illiberalism, extremism, spectacle in its early stages. That filter of the mind was visible in 2016. While exposed to the same chaos, certain people immediately resisted the illiberalism of Trumpism.

Not relying on institutional protection, these people had their “backbones on the inside”. These are also the sort of people I interviewed for Dark Shining Moment. At the end of the Politicology episode we also talked about that 6-part narrative retelling of Russia’s interference in the election.