This conversation with Elizabeth Anderson asks what it means to be a democratic citizen in a time when we find ourselves divided not only over values, but over facts. As lies, propaganda and fake news have hijacked political discourse on polarizing issues and distracted the electorate from constructive engagement of the problems we face, Anderson looks to thinkers like John Dewey and Susan Neiman in order to reframe democracy as a kind of culture that must be kept alive through civil society.

ELIZABETH ANDERSON is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She specializes in moral and political philosophy, social and feminist epistemology, and the philosophy of the social sciences.

ALEXIS PAPAZOGLOU is an Editor at the Institute of Art and Ideas, London and host of “The Philosopher & The News” podcast. He writes on the intersection between philosophy, politics and current affairs.

Alexis Papazoglou (AP): In his inauguration speech, President Biden said, “Let's begin to listen to one another, hear one another, see one another, show respect for one another”. Your 2019 Uehiro Lectures at the University of Oxford are about the ethics of communication, and you try to articulate the conditions that would make possible a constructive discourse across political and identity divides in order to enhance our democracy. One of the things you focus on is what has gone wrong with our discourse around facts, with talk of “alternative facts”, “fake news”, and even a “post-truth era” in which a shared reality of facts is no longer available as a starting point for political discourse. How did we arrive here?

Elizabeth Anderson (EA): This kind of polarization of facts has been going on for several decades now. Much of it was initially driven by right-wing media, but the more recent driving force has been social media and their use of algorithms to amplify polarizing voices and outrage. The algorithms have discovered that polarizing discourse holds people's attention on these sites, and the longer you pay attention to something, the more money social media companies make on their advertisements. So those are the voices that get amplified. How do you generate polarization? By telling lies or presenting facts in a very misleading way that arouses fear and anger.