Disordered Discourse

Elliot Higgins, founder and creative director of Bellingcat, posted a thread on BlueSky yesterday that summed up our current communication dysfunction in a way I hadn't thought of it before, with more explanatory power:

What we’re witnessing in America is what happens when disordered discourse captures a political party, then the state itself. The Republican Party was the first to fall - abandoning truth for conspiracy, ideology for grievance, and policy for performative outrage.

Now, with its grip on institutions, disordered discourse isn’t just shaping politics - it has overtaken those in power, who now govern as if manufactured narratives were reality, eroding the state and democracy itself from within.

Disordered discourse doesn’t just govern through those who believe its manufactured narratives - it forces even those who don’t to submit. To stay in power, they must either bend the knee to the lies or become the next target of the machine they helped create.

America is not unique. Any democracy can fall to state capture by disordered discourse if there’s no systematic response. This isn’t something we can fact-check our way out of - it’s deeper than misinformation. It’s about power, identity, and the narratives that shape reality itself.

We’re living through a fundamental shift in how discourse is created. Institutions once shaped a shared reality through discourse - imperfectly, but with structure. Now, that reality has splintered. In its place, engagement-driven ecosystems amplify whatever resonates, truth optional.

The result? A fragmented public consciousness where competing realities coexist, each self-reinforcing and resistant to correction. When truth is no longer a shared foundation, power shifts to those who control the most compelling narrative - no matter how detached from reality it is.

Democracies weren’t built around this. They depend on a shared reality, however contested, to function. When governance becomes a battle between competing fictions rather than policy and truth, institutions designed for debate and compromise become tools for enforcing narratives.

The end result is what we’re seeing in the U.S. - a democracy struggling to function because its institutions are trapped in disordered discourse. Governance isn’t about solving problems; it’s about demonstrating loyalty to manufactured narratives.

If you think this can’t happen outside the U.S., consider that we’re all subject to the same forces - social media-driven discourse, collapsing institutional trust, and the rise of narratives untethered from reality. It’s a systemic vulnerability in every democracy.

We need to consider what this means for our democracies at the most fundamental level. If governance is shaped by engagement-driven narratives over reality, how do institutions survive? If truth is irrelevant to power, what stops disordered discourse from capturing the state everywhere?

Disordered discourse thrives on systemic drivers: engagement-driven algorithms, collapsing trust in institutions, news influencers shaping reality through identity, and the erosion of shared discourse. These forces don’t just distort politics - they reshape democracy itself.

Higgins followed up with a thread on solutions, including examples that exist in other countries. While those types of solutions are clearly what's needed, they sound like pie-in-the-sky, given the situation the U.S. is in currently, with the Right undermining the basic idea of public education as liberal indoctrination.

A bit later in the day, Dave Roberts from the Volts podcast posted a thread that seemed to be in response, but wasn't:

Hi, broken record here. The same degraded information environment that led to Trump being elected is still in place. Most people still aren't being told what's happening, who's at fault, or what the effects will be. And there's zero reason to think traumatic events will "wake people up."

People want to think that trauma -- being fired from their job, losing medicaid, whatever -- will "force people to face reality," but that's not how people work. When people face trauma they turn to voices they trust to tell them who's doing it, and why, and what it means.

Trauma does not tell its own story. Yes, people will get angry, they'll be unhappy, but they will not just automatically know who's to blame or why it happened or how to fix it. They won't magically "wake up" to that knowledge unless *someone tells them*. Events will not do dems' communications for them.

Start solving the info problem -- figure out how to get good information and pro-social narratives in front of ordinary people, repeatedly -- or all else is lost. No deus ex machina is coming. Dems solve this or America keeps going down the road it's on.

There's no sign that the Democratic leadership has gotten that message, I hate to say.