Facebook, Donald Trump, and the myth of open platforms

The aftermath of the 2016 election has been dominated by two questions. How did Donald Trump win? And did the Democratic Party tilt too much toward Hillary Clinton, choking Bernie Sanders’s candidacy and condemning America to a Trump presidency? Lurking in these questions is a very modern vision of electoral politics. Today, we see elections, and even party primaries, as open platforms; to imagine anything else is unnatural. But primary elections didn’t exist in American politics until the beginning of the 20th century, and they did not decide presidential nominees until the 1970s.

Today, the reigning ideology is that the people are wise, and elites are dangerously self-interested, and so our systems are built, at least superficially, to empower the people and foil the elites. This is the ideology of open platforms, and it is pervasive. It is why Mark Zuckerberg does not want to be seen deciding between true and false news, why the idea that Democratic Party elites favored Hillary Clinton rankles so deeply, why Republican delegates meekly assented to Donald Trump’s nomination. It is why we are so trusting of markets, of consumers, of crowds. If Mark Zuckerberg censors what we see on Facebook, it’s a scandal. If Facebook users make ugly choices in what to like and share, there is no one to blame; in fact, who are you to even call those choices ugly?