Observations From My “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy” Seminar, 2018

In case you are interested, here’s a glimpse at what Yale undergrads are thinking about our political prospects today.

End-of-semester observations — mine and my students’ — in the ‘Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy’ seminar (Political Science and Ethics, Politics, & Economics) at Yale College, Fall semester, 2018

Dec. 16, 2018

There were nine students in this seminar. The following conversation took place online only after our last class meeting and only after they and the registrar had been given their final grades for the semester, so they were free to say whatever they wanted. Three of the nine didn’t post, but one of those had a very fruitful conversation with me.

They’re 19 -21 years old, five men, four women. One is from Singapore, another from Munich via Mexico City (half-Mexican, half-German); another from a South African Jewish family that moved to California when he was 7. The rest are American-born, two of them with parents or grandparents who are immigrants.

I’ve dropped their last names and changed their first names but haven’t changed a syllable of what they or I wrote. Here’s my final note to the class, followed by their responses and two more from me.

Is this an unusual and unscientific sample? Yes. They applied to take the course; I selected them. But this isn’t an “elite” group of poli sci majors; it includes four sophomores; a varsity athlete; an English major; three Yale Daily News journalists, one of whom broke a lot of news that was #MeToo in nature; two conservative students who participate in conservative programs and study groups on campus.

What you’ll read in these 5500 words is fairly representative, though, of my experiences teaching Yale undergrads for 20 years (I’ve taught just one course a year, each a seminar of from 7 to 18 students — a total of 196 students.) 

I dare say that this unedited look at Yale undergrads speaking for themselves about their work in one of their courses is something we haven’t seen in the media, where everything is necessarily (and sometimes unnecessarily!) filtered through reporters’, pundits’, and editors’ interpretations, emphases, preconceptions, and imaginations.

As a supplement, just in case you’re really interested, here’s the official course description and syllabus that the students used.

James Sleeper

Dec 16 at 7:18pm

Each of you has wisdom from other courses and experiences, but let me make four brief observations about what I hope you’ll retain from this one. I’m posting this message in Canvas as a last Discussion section, and I hope that you’ll find a few minutes and some inclination to share your observations, to which others of you can respond in turn.

First: This course — somewhat like today’s hyper-pluralistic, chaotic public sphere — exposed you to a wide array of themes, topics, and genres or writing styles (as well as to two guest speakers, the movie, and the back-and-forth among us on Canvas and in class). I designed this potpourri to stimulate your powers of integrative or synthetic judgment, with only light guidance from me on the undercurrents — national/global, technological/economic, and political/philosophical — that are reshaping the prospects or fate of the liberal-democratic public sphere that we posited in the opening weeks.

None of us is a “licensed” expert on any of these undercurrents or on the proposed ways of riding and channeling them that we encountered, and although some of you are more knowledgeable and experienced than others about one or two of them. So, somewhat implausibly, but by design, this course challenged you to be not an expert but an “omnicompetent citizen” of the kind that Walter Lippmann told us barely exists.

Second: Many of you wrote about the ideal of the public sphere as an aspiration, not a reality — that is, as a “constitutive fiction.” Constitutive fictions are inescapable and invaluable in humans’ search for better ways to live together and to steward the planet. The human urges to grow and transcend that Nayan Chanda’s chapter mentioned — to explore, to evangelize, to trade/profit, and to conquer — all rely on constitutive fictions as models, myths, constructions. An important insight from our  “Journalism, Liberalism and Democracy” (JLD) seminar is that people crave these so intensely that some dedicate and even sacrifice their lives to fulfilling them. (I once heard Benedict Anderson say that although nobody dies willingly for Standard Oil, millions have laid down their lives for nations as he and Wiebe described them, and for political and artistic/cultural undertakings.) I have my eye on some of you as potential weavers and carriers of constitutive fictions, like some former members of this seminar.

Third: A few of you who chose to write the essay on “Who to blame” for the failures of the liberal-democratic public sphere argued — wisely, in my view — that Lippmann goes too far toward blaming “the people” and trusting the experts as much as he does. At one point, I mentioned that people have been sitting at Davos for a decade now sighing sagely to one another that “the people” must be ruled deftly and wisely because otherwise they’re every bit as incompetent and susceptible to demagoguery as Lippmann portrayed.

Because you’re a Yalie, you’re more likely than most other people to encounter strong pressures and seductive incentives to advance your own prospects by accepting that pessimistic view and profiting on it in ways that reinforce it as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some of our readings introduced you to those temptations and to the dangers in succumbing to them. Time after time, experts and elites have demonstrated only that they can barely rule themselves, let alone other people. Wise but substantial investments in “the people” — economic, narrative, political — pay off. Several former members of this seminar are working hard and well at it now. The consequences of under-investing — and of investing only in the people’s degradation, which can be profitable, indeed — are devouring liberal-democratic spheres right now.

Fourth: Many of you are astute in assessing the logistical and economic challenges confronting journalism as a unique, indispensable stimulant and enabler of liberal democracy. My own efforts as a would-be carrier of viable constitutive fictions have carried me from one technology to another over the years, working as an editor and writer for daily newspapers and monthly magazines and as an occasional NPR and PBS commentator and, in recent years, blogger and online columnist. Others among you may never want a license to commit punditry; you’ll be much closer to designing the funding and communications systems that people like me have only surfed. Still others will plumb the wellsprings from which constitutive fictions come. I hope that what you’ve encountered in JLD will help you to find your way.

Lauren 

JLD is, as Professor Sleeper points out, essentially a civics class. We took a deep dive into the “undercurrents” of our democracy and analyzed how we, as liberally-educated students, might play a role in crafting and preserving a modern democratic public sphere. The outlook can seem very grim, but seeing how enthusiastically our class engaged in the questions of the course helped me look toward the future with more optimism.

I think the goal of a good civics class is to both teach students about how to be a citizen-participant in democracy and to encourage them to feel passionately about doing so. The discussions we had in JLD did both, and helped reinforce how important it is to consider these questions as we each embark on different careers.

In class, we spent a long time looking at the deep issues plaguing our public sphere and asking what we would like to see instead. But as these discussions took place, left largely unaddressed was the question of how. How do we save investigative journalism? How do we craft the thick adhesives in our society that encourage the exercise of positive liberty? How do we tackle challenges of representation and fragmentation when we live in a country of millions with no common understanding of the truth?

As Professor Sleeper mentioned, having shared “constitutive fictions” is essential. While we did not spend a great amount of time contemplating the solutions to these challenges, we did gain an understanding of the importance of the issues themselves. And together, as we learned how the problems we face will impact our new future, we clarified our own constitutive fictions. While it often seems as though we have drifted frighteningly far from our original democratic principles, I think the macro scale of our conversations in this course helped us envision how we might update and strengthen our aspirations. Having a shared understanding of the pressing threats to our democracy is a powerful tool when considering how to address them.

Anyway, I hope everyone is has a good finals period!! It was a pleasure to get to know each of you over the course of the class and I hope everyone has a wonderful break!

Reed 

Lauren mentions that JLD is, at its core, about civics. Indeed, the class is inspired, in part, by the premise, not without evidence, that American social and political life is in decline. In fact, exploring the roots and consequences of America’s civic decay was one of my main reasons for taking this class. I enjoyed how JLD engaged this topic from Arendt’s “rootedness” perspective and through theories about the “thick” constitutive fictions that moor individuals in society. At the same time, I like to question my easy assent to the idea that Americans are losing all our social and civic bonds. We certainly are in some ways, but America’s problems are also more nuanced, and perhaps less extreme, than this thesis lets on. On this front, I’ve enjoyed looking at empirical work from social scientists like Scott Winship, who carefully avoids exaggerating or over-generalizing the U.S.’s social ills while still acknowledging them where they exist.

As far as solutions go, I’ve become much more optimistic about social media’s potential to enhance the public sphere over the last few weeks of the course. Starkman’s vision of old institutions adapting to these new media has given me a new hope for journalism’s prospects as a unifying and democracy-promoting force, though the details of this transition are still far from clear to me. I also thought Katharine Viner’s Guardian article excellently articulated this clash of new and old media. Though I still think physical deliberation in small communities is always necessary, I also suspect new technology properly regulated and given time to experiment might come to surprise its skeptics, and this class has helped us consider what these new media need to succeed (from the bedrock principles outlined in Benhabib to the particular logistical issues addressed in our later digitalization authors).

Democratic societies (even those small poleis of ancient Greece) have always had to rely on a certain public imagination of “the people” – the problem of imagining ourselves as a self-governing people has grown more complex with the paradox of representation, but we’ve always found new ways of imagining and giving voice to the public will, however fictive it may be. Our authors have described (quite depressingly at times) how the digital age poses new problems for this imagined public will through fake news, virality over truth, sensationalism, the sheer deluge of information and voices – the list goes on… Though all these problems are, as Lauren points out, far easier to describe than to solve, democracies’ adaptive ability remains strong as long as society’s guides and guardians remain attuned to these developments. The democratic will has always found ways of preserving and reimagining itself in the past, and I’m confident it will continue to do so despite these challenges – just how it will is still uncertain.

Well, that’s my best attempt at an optimistic conclusion. Thank you all for such a great class!! It’s been fun. Hope you all enjoy the break

James Sleeper

Monday Dec 17 at 6:54pm

• In response to these two splendid posts I’ll say only that when some of the readings (and one or two of the instructor’s darker musings) drew us a step or two into the abysses that open unpredictably in our not-so-flat neoliberal world, it was more by design than by accident or excess. The course is designed in part to innoculate ourselves against some disappointments that lie ahead and that exist just outside of class. The early 20th century political writer Antonio Gramsci sought to couple “pessimism of the intelllect” with “optimism of the will.” I think that we found ourselves doing that at times in JLD.
• And, Reed, apropos social media’s challenges, google “Kevin Roose” (a NY Times columnist) and “Social Media’s Forever War.”  (Also, if any of you are gluttons for my jeremiadic torments, see “Jim Sleeper” and “How Hollow Speech Enables Hostile Speech.”)

Jack 

The challenge of being an omni-competent citizen begins with recognizing with that feat’s importance as well as its challenges. The discussions we’ve had the privilege of engaging in about our constitutive fictions serve not only as interesting points of analysis but as distantly deliberative debates about how we will guide, participate in, and alter these fictions—in our own small ways.

I know that I have been influenced by our little liberal democratic public sphere in ways that I will carry into my future choices and beliefs. Most centrally, I have held the expansive self-interest idea very closely to me this semester. I think that understanding the gravity of the issues the public sphere faces can engender stronger commitments to it.

Lauren brings up the “how” questions, and rightly points out their complexity. I think an appropriate response is cultivating the types of conversations we have been having for the last semester. In a majoritarian society, huge changes can swing by way of incremental shifts.

Politics is irresolvable and messy; when we get caught up in the oft-frustrating unenlightenedness of the public, it is tempting to revert to political elitism. And nostalgia makes contemporary criticism  feel compelling, but we should remember that we have not drifted away from a perfected model. Rather, politics has always been and will always be irresolvable. Our investment in the process is whats important. These conversations are part of that investment, so we should do our part to facilitate and cultivate them wherever we go. We are not certainly perfect receivers and absorbers of information, as Lippmann points out, but when we create an atmosphere to share our varied experiences and ideas, we are better off.

Thank you all for a deeply influential semester.

Anton

Thanks for the class, everyone!  Jack, amen to your last paragraph.

As Lauren mentioned in her response, our class was less concerned with thinking of solutions to the threats facing the liberal-democratic public sphere. I wonder if a solution-oriented approach would have enriched our conversations. I believe that our journalism and media landscapes are undergoing so many changes that ‘diagnosing’ the current state of affairs might be all we can do at the moment. Hopefully, we’ve been equipped with a mental framework that will help us better judge future developments and act accordingly.

If anything, this class has provided us with a clearer picture on how to judge the different incentives and frameworks that explain individual and corporate behavior in our society, and how to think critically about profit-seeking companies (aka not just blaming everything on an intangible notion of ‘capitalism’). The idea that corporations are mindless (and not evil per se) and operate in flawed systems (as we learned from various readings and from Daniel Greenwood) has been an interesting exercise in moral judgment, one I hope to refine in the years to come.

As mentioned in Prof. Sleeper’s post, many of us (Yalies) will be fortunate enough to consider different career paths. Some of these will be highly lucrative yet rely on — and profit from — business models that disregard — and, occasionally, directly oppose — the virtues we value most. In fact, we live in a society where exploitation is often connected to monetary gain, and thus, we will often feel tempted to rationalize exploitative business models and behavior. Especially as I go through the job application process for a full-time position, I often find myself trying to defend the business models of the companies I apply to.

Looking back, I’m really glad we got to discuss the topics of this class in such an intimate group, both inside and outside classroom. I hope everyone has wonderful holidays and I hope to see you around campus!|

TH 

Being with you all this past semester has been a huge learning experience for me, especially as an outsider looking in, coming from a country which has a vastly different political philosophy than America’s. JLD has been, to me, a rigorous introduction to the American value system and ideals – it has forced me to clarify the nature of a public sphere, democracy, and what sort of compromise or innovation is necessary of society as we confront globalization and rising populism. 

If you’d allow me to use Singapore as an example (for the umpteenth time) again, I’d like to illustrate a broader question that has emerged from our discussions together. In Singapore, there has recently been talk of a new “fake news law” that is being created to tackle the issue of disinformation; with broad-ranging powers of silencing being bestowed upon government (https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/select-committee-on-fake-news-22-recommendations-unveiled-to-combat-online-falsehoods (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.). 

It is at instances like this that I personally am at a loss for what is “right”. In America, the proposition of moral regulation by the government is a “non-starter” precisely because a liberal state commits to not imposing a certain morality on the nation. But at the same time, is there something inherently wrong about the state imposing a certain morality on the people, as long as this morality is up for contestation as times change? (i.e. the status quo in Singapore, but with provisions to enable people to genuinely debate whether they agree with the government’s stance) 

On the other hand, must we necessarily commit to the view of the philosopher-king (that is, to view humans in hierarchies – which is something I am personally against; I grew up in a working-class family and amongst people that the elites in Singapore have implicitly deemed “unfit” to decide the future of the country) in order to justify the swift and decisive actions of the state? I am partial to, and want to believe, the idea undergirding democracy that every person is equal, and that unrestricted (and constructive) discourse shepherded by journalism would produce benign results. Yet, our course has introduced to us the pitfalls of such faith, with the pandering of conglomerate news and dilution of veracious journalism by the internet threatening to reduce the integrity of public discourse.

America is, in my opinion, burdened by its inheritance of a political system tarnished by partisan politicking. Singapore is hindered by the ossified view that authoritarianism and paternalism is the only way to rescue people from their own incompetence. The solution of how to rescue the public sphere, as you all have rightly mentioned as still ambiguous, would remain salient for all of us as we begin to contribute to society in our various capacities. I think a step towards such an answer is our view of the role of journalism to democracy and to governance: is it a curator, interpreter, exposer, or defender of the truth? Perhaps it is all, or none of them. I believe each of our personal answers to this question, at different points of our personal journeys, would be instructive to how we view the ideal state, and what we need to do to get there. Have a good break everyone!

James Sleeper

I’m grateful — to TH and to all of you —  for your spirit of mutual respect in sharing varied perspectives with one another, and for your actual insights: They are many, and manifold, and they foretell rich futures for you all (even if not “rich” in market terms).

First, an additional observation of my own: The liberal-democratic and the civic-republican models that we encountered in Seyla Benhabib and Gordon Wood overlap, but they’re not the same in theory, even though they’re often indistinguishable in “real life” undertakings and experiences.

The theory of “liberal democracy” is a bit too thin to guarantee the strength of its own moral premises and practices: Recall my image of the “liberal” traffic cop who keeps people from speeding or otherwise crashing into one another but has no authority or control (and should have none) over what directions they’re going in, let alone over their motives in selecting them. The Benhabib/Habermas approach tries to enrich liberal-democratic discourse with presumptions or at least expectations of mutual respect, forbearance, and rationality — reason-giving — in the communications process, instead of letting it be usurped by the elemental drives of profit-maximizing,  bureaucracy, and demagoguery that, reacting against the civic and spiritual affronts of the first two drives, rides on the raw power of the strongest and most charismatic personalities and their henchmen.

Note, though, that the root word “demos,” or “the people.” is contained in both the words “democracy” and “demagoguery”, because the people who supposedly rule are sometimes all-too easily stampeded. Liberal-democratic theory has a hole in its soul that leaves it too-easily susceptible to “free-market” theories that, like the horses and machines, are indispensable to human striving but are even thinner and more hollow by the richest humanist measures. There is much more to say about this, encompassing the psychopathology of crowds and reckonings with human nature.

The liberal-democratic ideal presumes that these reckonings have been resolved in ways that enable fair public deliberation, decision-making, and obedience to law. (The motto engraved on a courthouse in Worcester, Massachusetts — the city of my birth– reads: “Obedience to Law is Liberty,” reflecting an assumption that “rule of law” is an achievement of democratic deliberation.)

The civic-republican dimension is “richer” in humanist terms, but also more demanding. (Ancient Greek “democracy” anticipated and integrated a lot of what I mean by “civic republican.” ) Its premises and practices fill in, or flesh out, a liberal-democratic framework by summoning and nourishing the vigorous exercise of positive liberty and its enabling civic, social benefits; recall my metaphor of a society walking on two feet — the “left” foot of social provision, of the village that raises the child, and the “right” foot of irreducibly personal autonomy and conscience — each foot relying on the strength of the other as a society oscillates back and forth from one to the other in an integrated stride.

Achieving that stride gives a state its believable “moral” authority – the kind indicated on that Worcester courthouse – -as distinct from the conflict-avoiding authority of the traffic cop. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian leader and founder of that country as a highly successful but tightly ordered city-state and world-capitalist crossroads, believed that only his direction and authority — that of the “philosopher-king,” if you will — could prepare, train, and inspire an otherwise unprepared populace and civil society to achieve a balanced stride.

In contrast, the framers of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution — believed that they could adopt and enact the constitutive fiction that “We, the people,” were already capable of forming a more-perfect union than the monarchy had been able to do.

Lauren, Jack, Anton, Reed, Emma, TH and others of you now also recognize more clearly than before how much is at stake in this challenge for yourselves, for society, and even for the planet. All of you are welcome to keep talking with me and apprising me of your triumphs and travails.

Emma

I agree with Lauren in that the micro-level conversations we had for two hours each week certainly strengthened our aspirations and made us more aware of the undercurrents in our civil sphere, or questioned our potential career prospects at the very least. The following question I have is: what can we do with this liberal arts Yale education and experience from this course to navigate the contemporary public sphere, and eventually update it? Tragically, not everyone can take this course (even the people who might need it most!). How do we pass on these concerns to others? Now, I feel a responsibility to some degree — stemming from the acknowledgment of my privilege of attending this institution and getting into this class — to play a part in shaping the liberal democratic public sphere positively, in my personally sized contribution.

This course taught me to question aspects of the media I trusted so unconditionally before, specifically re: the information I consume via network/broadcast news. While building the foundation of understanding for liberalism and nationalism was necessary to pursue further topics of discussion, I particularly enjoyed the tail end of the course about modern developments in journalism and the public sphere. The issues that plague social media and the current media companies’ profitability-business model, while still daunting, feel more manageable to grasp and seem more receptive to change within our lifetime. I’m not sure what this would look like in action, but

I would be interested in seeing a revamping of social media guidelines and priorities, or brainstorming new revenue streams to keep media companies afloat while subverting the profit motive. I want to bring up what Andy pointed out in his post, proposing the “solution-oriented approach” that could have enriched our conversations. (I would have loved to discuss alternate business models for media companies even more thoroughly, if time had permitted!) As I’ve been thinking about these issues and my career goals for the future, I (like you all!) question my judgment with the new mental framework, and wonder how I can act accordingly and not further exacerbate this issues we diagnosed throughout this course.

In this class, we’ve been faced with countless paradoxes and catch 22s. The one that is most troubling to me, is the profitability-foreign news model. For-profit media companies don’t favor or cover foreign news extensively, because it’s not as well-received by consumers. Why hasn’t the humanitarian crisis in Yemen made it to mainstream American news until only recently? How do we get the American people to care more proactively about things happening halfway across the world? As the world continues to become more globalized through social media, stories and narratives will continue to become interconnected. I fear with the nationalistic approach to national media, we may underestimate the cost of threatening our interconnectedness and compounding foreign alienation.

I imagine that we, as Yalies, are in a unique and uncomfortable position. Some of you all mentioned this in your posts, but we may be faced with hard decisions between a lucrative career at a company that might undermine the efforts of liberal democratic public sphere, and vice versa. Regardless of choice, we are all equipped with the ethical civilian mindset that will inevitably filter into our thinking and decisions going forward.

I agree with Jack when he mentions that while we are not perfect receivers and absorbers of information, when we create a dynamic atmosphere from our varied experiences and ideas, we are better off. Even within our little JLD public sphere, we all come from different backgrounds and have different aspirations, but I’m so glad we could all come together and debate these issues that affect us all. This class has been a high of the semester, and I honestly looked forward to discussing with you all every week. Have a wonderful and restful break, and I’ll see you around campus!

James Sleeper

Emma, thank you. It’s true that we had more than enough on our plate to digest concerning the basic challenges and that we didn’t have much room or time to discuss solutions, let alone how to develop them in your varied career options! Jack is right to note that big changes actually come from accumulated, small increments, and I believe that each of you is better equipped to take measures that matter — even if they begin only by saying, in a meeting of a board, “Now, wait a minute, let me make sure that I really understand this and that we’ve looked more thoroughly into Alternative X, Because here’s how the public interest and our own gains might be improved by it…”. That’s what some Yalies do so well — and what most journalists and propagandists may not get wind of until some time after you’ve done it. (That’s why this society needs some of you as journalists!)