Deliberating with Diablo: How to Confront the Crisis of Political Communication and Help Save Democracy

Abstract

The crisis of democracy is largely a crisis of public communication. Dishonest and manipulative communication from unscrupulous elites—massively amplified by social media—distorts public spheres and helps drive democratic backsliding. Can citizens see through these manipulations and set a deliberative constraint—including minimal truthfulness and civility norms—on bad elite behavior? No single intervention will of itself heal the public sphere. Rather a robust discursive infrastructure consisting of diverse interpersonal networks, smart deliberative interventions, and democratic activism is vital, alongside the construction of discursive bridges to those attracted by populism, authoritarianism, and extremism.

Democracy’s outlook goes from bad to worse. Trump’s second presidency marks the coming of age of what Levitsky and Way (2025) call “competitive authoritarianism” where the functioning of democratic regimes is severely undermined, as free speech is restricted, critics are repressed, and elections become less free and less fair. Modern competitive authoritarianism is accompanied—as well as amplified—by cunning communicative strategies of unscrupulous elites taking advantage of the (digital) transformation of the communicative soundscape. While in earlier times, authoritarian leaders advanced their power interests via brute force, patronage, co-optation or rigid censorship, they nowadays mainly engineer support by disseminating resonating narratives and manipulating public discourse. “Spin dictators” (Vladimir Putin is one of the archetypes) now outnumber “fear dictators” (Guriev and Treisman, 2022)—and their strategies and playbooks are copied by authoritarian populists such as Donald Trump in liberal-democratic systems. Thus, the current crisis of democracy is in large measure a crisis of political and public communication, produced by spin dictators and other unscrupulous elites. As Chambers and Kopstein (2023) argue, it is “bad actors”—specifically, “new authoritarian forces”—at the root of the problem. However, these actors’ subversion of democracy is further enabled and amplified by the “platformization” of the public sphere (Jarren and Fischer, 2021), producing fragmentation and polarization (via algorithmic filtering), cognitive overload, misinformation, as well as a reduction in argumentative complexity and civility.

Now, the public sphere has never seen a golden age of reasoned discourse (see below) and political discontent and distrust have long been capable of undermining democratic systems. But these trends have clearly intensified in recent years. Quite when the slide began is a matter for debate (in 2015, the Journal of Democracy celebrated its 25th anniversary with a series of laments about the state of democracy). But we now live in an increasingly “diabolical soundscape” (Bächtiger and Dryzek, 2024) where hyper-partisan and extremist media spread misinformation and lies, “flood the zone with shit” (Steve Bannon), force others to constantly deal with bullshit arguments (Frankfurt, 2005) and attack opponents and vulnerable groups, misleading and dividing citizens. Given the disruptive dynamics of current times and especially of Trump’s second presidency, it is easy to feel hopeless in the face of what seems like populist and extremist takeover.

There is a by now a small industry exploring responses to democracy’s crisis. Its themes include better behavior by elite actors (such as upholding norms of institutional restraint), institutional constraints (such as checks and balances), the electoral broadening of conservative parties (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018), or institutional reform more generally (such as ranked-choice voting or the abolition of direct primaries in the US; Diamond, 2020; Jacobs, 2024). But better elite behavior is unlikely so long as incentives to exploit of communicative pathologies are so powerful. Conservative parties are not broadening; if not taken over by extremes (as in the US Republican Party), they are moving to the right and narrowing in order to head off challenges from still more extreme parties such as Reform in the UK and AfD in Germany. Checks and balances for their part falter in Trump’s second presidency, with loyalists installed in the courts, bureaucracy, and even military; Republican control all three branches of government; and unwelcome court orders are ignored. Institutional reforms, while important in the long run, are hard to enact, given unscrupulous elites who have gained power profit from the status quo. How can we save democracy in these diabolical times? In this essay, we discuss the key contribution of an under-explored deliberative approach (Bächtiger and Dryzek, 2024) that revolves around a strengthening of society’s discursive infrastructure to help citizens see through elite manipulations, in combination with democratic activism and the building of discursive bridges.

Toward a Deliberative Response

Before we detail the contours of our deliberative approach, let us first get a better understanding of the drivers of democratic (in)stability. Here, it is profitable to take a closer look at a long-standing, rational choice-based approach by Barry Weingast (1997). Weingast’s starting point is that elites support democracy only when failure to do so risks losing support from citizens that is necessary to maintain the elite’s power. This assumes there is significant citizen support for democratic norms (and a look beyond elite norms and restraint!). Now, there is an empirical literature showing that citizen support for democratic norms is shaky when transgressions of democratic norms promote their immediate political goals and interests (Graham and Svolik, 2020; Krishnarajan, 2022). This shakiness, however, is a constituent part of Weingast’s approach. In the short run, citizens might be tempted to accept violations of democratic norms that directly benefit them. In the long run, however, these same citizens will rarely profit from democratic norm violation and reliance on strongman leaders. Studies show that citizens around the globe (including the US) strongly support institutional checks against authoritarian leaders and unfettered majoritarianism (Chu et al., 2024). Thus, many citizens still support the liberal-democratic order, if not because they believe intrinsically in these norms and values, but through enlightened self-interest. What is critical in this regard is that citizens become more aware of the content of liberal-democratic norms and values, and come to understand that, in the long run, they will be hurt by the short-term transgressions of authoritarian leaders; they need to be able to see through elite communicative manipulations and attempts at division.

This directly brings us to deliberation and deliberative norms. Now, some observers have depicted deliberation as rational, moderate argument with an orientation toward consensus. But this is a caricature view of deliberation. A rationalist and consensual understanding of deliberation is on a collision course with the foundational literature in the field (including Jürgen Habermas). Analyzing how political legitimacy is (communicatively) produced in modern times, Habermas is fully open to informal and diffuse communication in the broad civic sphere. Here, communicative practices may be highly varied, including loud contestation and story-telling (whereby all communicative acts should encounter criticism and argument); consensus is only a “presupposition” of productive communication, not a practical aim of deliberation or its expected product. An appropriate understanding of deliberation therefore stresses that its form depends on context and aims (Bächtiger and Parkinson, 2019). With an eye on the public sphere, good deliberation can involve robust contestation, emotional expression, and bold rhetoric. But when we move to conciliation and bridge-building with angry or deprived citizens, then deliberation may also involve careful listening, respect, and mutual understanding.

Whatever its concrete form, deliberation always comes with expectations and aspirations. This involves, on the one hand, a minimal “truthfulness norm” entailing a “willingness to correct errors in assertion” (Cohen and Fung, 2023). On the other hand, it involves a minimal “civility” norm, meaning a willingness to engage the other side, rather than disparage it or demonizing it. If enough citizens buy into such minimal deliberative norms, then elites confront a “deliberative constraint” (Bächtiger and Dryzek, 2024). When elites manipulate citizens with false information and lies or try to divide them by playing off societal groups against each other, then most citizens would then ignore or punish such behavior, for example, by voting against such elites.

Naïve Hope or Realistic Aspiration?

This deliberative response may sound naïve given current dire circumstances, especially in the United States. How can we realistically hope that a deliberative constraint will ever apply in a truly diabolical soundscape? Even Jürgen Habermas is now deeply skeptical about deliberative aspirations. In his view, the rise of competing and potentially irreconcilable publics via social media undermines the idea of a unified public sphere involving “an inclusive space for possible discursive clarification of competing claims to truth and the generalisation of interests” (Habermas, 2022). We think otherwise and argue that while Habermas’ vision of a unitary public sphere may have always been a fiction, it is possible to develop a robust deliberative response to the diabolical soundscape.

To start, what would be naïve indeed would be to try to deliberate directly with spin dictators, authoritarian and populist leaders, media merchants of hatred, and other elites who prosper in the diabolical soundscape. Our position here resonates with the Christian tradition that dialogue with the devil should be avoided. As Pope Francis said in 2017, “since the devil is a very clever and rhetorically superior ‘person’, deliberating with it is very dangerous and can turn one’s head.” The failure of Trump’s advisors when they confronted him with evidence and reason in his first term is noteworthy here (see Woodward, 2018). But is it possible to enlist others, including the larger citizenry, in productive deliberation with people attracted to authoritarianism, populism, and extremism, but who might be induced to do better?

Many deliberationists see deliberative capacity among citizens as given, but an almost century-long skeptical or “realist” tradition in political science highlights the incompetence of citizens in reasoning about how to vote, let alone when it comes to the seemingly more demanding activity of deliberation (see Brennan, 2016). On this “realist” account, widespread political ignorance combines with cognitive biases, especially “motivated reasoning” (Taber and Lodge, 2006), implying that people only look for evidence and arguments that support their pre-existing positions and beliefs. The skeptical tradition reaches an apogee with alleged “backfire effects,” whereby counterarguments and counterevidence induce partisans to polarize their opinions (Kahan, 2013).

The “realist” approach to citizen competence and bias has become a “folk theory” both in and outside academia. But it is far less substantiated by empirical evidence than its adherents think. Empirical deliberation research has demonstrated that lay citizens indeed have the ability to engage in systematic reasoning, good listening, and argument-based opinion change (Esterling et al., 2021; Gerber et al., 2014, 2018; Westwood, 2015). Under deliberative conditions, citizens not only learn factual knowledge and change opinions (see Fishkin, 2025); even affectively polarized citizens depolarize their opinions and “warm” to political opponents, as documented by two big national deliberative experiments in the United States (Fishkin et al., 2021; Levendusky and Stecula, 2021).

Recent trends in political psychology challenge the “folk theory” as well (see Muradova, 2025). In examining 20 policy issues, Tappin et al. (2023) find that persuasive messages—not just cues from leaders—influence the positions of partisan citizens. In a seminal study, Druckman et al. (2013) have demonstrated that when no or moderately polarized partisan cues are presented to participants, then “strong frames”—representing sort of “proto-arguments” (see Leeper and Slothuus, 2018)—shift participants’ opinions in direction of the stronger message, irrespective of their partisan orientation. Only when party polarization is extreme do participants followed partisan cues, rather than substantive messages. Other studies find that backfire effects prove relatively rare, as citizens are more likely to be persuaded—rather than digging in—by contravening evidence and argument (Guess and Coppock, 2020). Coppock (2022) proposes an alternative account to “motivated reasoning,” dubbed “parallel persuasion.” This means that people change their minds in the direction of persuasive information (whatever side this information comes from), even when this information does not align with their initial opinions. If true, then a deliberative vision of political communication is closer than many deliberative democrats have ever thought (Bächtiger and Dryzek, 2024).

Above all, whether or not citizens reveal incompetence or competence, bias or judgment, polarize or depolarize their opinions proves to strongly depend on context (see Farrell et al., 2022). This suggests that citizen competency and deliberative abilities are “context-dependent products rather than hard-wired and invariant parameters of the human political condition” (Bächtiger and Dryzek, 2024). How then to activate this capacity in practice?

From Deliberative Innovations to Discursive Infrastructures

The easiest place to do so lies in designed innovations such as citizens’ assemblies and citizens’ juries Indeed, democratic innovations are now the carriers of many hopes for democracy’s future (Warren, 2025). But how do mini-publics reach broader publics and politics? Such forums can directly involve only a tiny minority of citizens, and their visibility is usually too low to generate broad public awareness and affect public discourse. Some of their advocates seek a more formally empowered role, to ensure that considered and filtered opinions of citizens—and not manipulated and distorted ones—are reflected in the content of policies. However, recent research shows that there is stark reluctance of citizens to grant designed citizen forums decision-making powers (Goldberg et al., 2024). This is largely true even for those who know about citizen forums and have participated in them. Hence, it is necessary to address the citizenry’s deliberative capacities beyond designed forums in more natural environments such as interpersonal networks and the broad public sphere of political communication.

Interpersonal networks can involve considerable opinion diversity (especially at the workplace) and even enable deliberative exchanges among citizens (Tanasoca, 2020). But such networks are no panacea in themselves, since engagement in them is biased to the more interested and privileged (Schmitt-Beck and Neumann, 2023). So, we need to focus on the structure of the public sphere as well.

Yet, the contemporary public sphere is fragmented, as Habermas (2022) has correctly emphasized. Fragmentation is often described in terms of “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers.” However, Bruns (2019: 1; see also Stark et al., 2020) concludes that there is actually little evidence for the existence of filter bubbles and that “search [engine] and social media users generally appear to encounter a highly centrist media that is, if anything, more diverse than non-users.” More recent research concludes that while echo chambers may not exist at the level of the outlets to which individuals attend, they do exist if we drill down to the content within such outlets—such as individual stories (Green et al., 2025). If this is right, the challenge becomes to induce individuals to pay more attention to stories from the other side in outlets they already access—which surely should not be beyond the wit of platform designers.

Other problems pervading the only public sphere include misinformation and online civility. Fake news, for instance, spreads faster than real news (Vosoughi et al., 2018). Proposed remedies include regulation of online media, content moderation, fact-checking, platform designs that make interactions less polarizing (Bail, 2021), empathy-based counter-speech (Hangartner et al., 2021), AI-based “conversation-enhancing” (Argyle et al., 2023), more critical and quality media (Benkler et al., 2018), and digital media literacy education. Such remedies might indeed make interactions more deliberative. But as with mini-publics, these interventions too might have limited societal reach. For instance, moderated platforms are currently far less popular than standard ones (such as Facebook, X, or YouTube). Fact-checking will not reach those captivated by extremist media, and becomes increasingly irrelevant in a Trumpian soundscape where nobody expects facts.

What this suggests is that there is no “silver bullet” solution in the form of a single sufficient or best deliberative response to the diabolical soundscape, but rather a “silver buckshot” approach (Boykoff, 2019, whose context is a bit different) consisting of a wide range of responses and interventions informed by deliberative ideals. Taken together, these interventions could make a difference and yield a robust discursive infrastructure that provides multiple locations for critical reflection and deliberation, in the interest of generating a healthier public sphere. What we have in mind are online and offline spaces where citizens are confronted with diverse opinions and information, engage and deliberate with others in civil ways and start to think and reflect on their opinions and beliefs (see also Cherian, 2025). In concrete, this might comprise interpersonal networks with sufficient diversity of opinions, quality media (including at the local level; Martin and McCrain, 2019), online forums with protections against incivility and fake news, designed mini-publics, but also numerous encounters with diverse others in cafes, parks, and other public spaces. We do not have a perfect or ideal discursive infrastructure in mind; we only suggest that more spaces for societal reflection and deliberation will make democracies better able to resist diabolical manipulations.

A robust discursive infrastructure does not exist in political vacuum but is strongly intertwined with the structure of formal political institutions. Consensus political systems (common in Northern and Continental Europe) with power-sharing across multiple parties prove to have higher deliberative quality than majoritarian systems that feature a clear divide between government and opposition, with an accompanying incentive to demonize opponents (Drutman, 2020). Consensus systems also reveal less polarization than majoritarian ones, in terms of both identity and issue opinions (Bernaerts et al., 2023).

Formal political institutions interact with media systems. Consensus political systems are characterized by a “democratic corporatist” media system with a strong role for public broadcasting, while majoritarian systems tend to have a less regulated “liberal” media system. The democratic corporatist model provides citizens with high quality hard news and balanced information, leading to a better-informed public and a higher willingness to listen to news inconsistent with existing political attitudes (Castro et al., 2018). And there may be spillover effects to social media: not only are social media systems in consensus systems less insular compared to their majoritarian counterparts (Urman, 2020), enhancing the chances that citizens are confronted with variegated perspectives, but there is also evidence that argumentative complexity in online debate is higher in consensus systems compared to majoritarian ones (Jakob et al., 2021).

However, these findings are hardly good news for majoritarian and polarized system such as the US, whose political institutions and constitutional system are so entrenched (even as they are under attack in 2025). Institutional change toward a more consensual democracy or public-oriented media systems is the longest of long shots. But societies lucky enough to possess such a configuration need to strive to defend and revitalize it.

For majoritarian and polarized political systems in particular, we therefore need to think in other directions about how to reenergize the new public sphere. By the same token, while a robust discursive infrastructure may help many citizens—especially “centrist ones”—to better see through elite manipulations, it is much harder to reach citizens who have succumbed to authoritarian populist and extremist appeals. They will ignore quality news and fact-checking. Extra efforts are required to induce such citizens into more meaningful deliberative relationships, or at least less harmful ones, to which we now turn.

Discursive Bridges

Long ago Jon Elster (1986) spoke of a “multiple self” that belies the fiction of a unitary, well-integrated self of the sort postulated by micro-economists, among others. Might citizens attracted to populism, extremism, denial, and authoritarianism also possess such multiplicity in their selves, and if so, might it provide an opening to more deliberative engagement with them? Here, we can draw on discursive psychology, which locates the self at the intersection of multiple discourses the individual engages (Harré and Gillett, 1994). A discourse can be understood as a shared way of understanding the world, embedded in language. For example, an authoritarian populist discourse might feature the concept of a pure, unitary real people, anti-elitism, and fidelity to a leader who can articulate the will of the people. There was a time when many who now engage this discourse could also be influenced by a very different discourse emphasizing the solidarity of the working class in opposition to plutocracy and the politicians who serve it. This discourse has seen steep decline in most countries. The challenge could be to revive it—and Bernie Sanders in the United States is one politician who has tried. The general point here involves populating the discursive territory with alternative discourses that might attract one side of people whose other side is attracted to authoritarian populism. Possible alternatives might include a nationalistic environmentalist discourse that appears in some far-right circles (seeing a protected natural environment as a key part of national identity) ¹ ; a discourse that treats freedom of religion, gay rights, and feminism as uniquely Western accomplishments; and a populist discourse that identifies plutocrats rather than cultural elites as the enemies of the people.

Aside from facilitating autonomy by their simple presence, some discourses are conducive to bridging to very different discourses. In a deliberative forum that deliberately recruited climate change deniers, Dryzek and Lo (2015) show such a bridge being unexpectedly constructed. One of the participants started using the term “Medicare for the climate” to describe carbon pricing. In Australia, where the forum was held, the Medicare Levy is an extremely popular tax that funds the universal public health service. The idea of a tax whose revenues were dedicated to the problem at hand—as opposed to disappearing into general government revenue—invoked a discourse of distrust in government to which both climate change believers and deniers could be attracted. Indeed, the deniers present started discussing the merits of a dedicated carbon tax—even though another side of their multiple self held to climate denial.

Discourses can also be invoked—even established—by political leaders, to good or bad deliberative effect. In the wake of the murder of 51 Muslims by a far-right extremist in 2019, New Zealand Prime Minister effectively invoked a discourse of belonging—referring to the victims, “they are us.” This was against a historical backdrop of widespread distrust toward Muslim immigrants. New Zealand has much less of a problem with populist authoritarians than many other countries, but her intervention was crucial in ensuring that far-right extremism was marginalized, and a more benign discourse dominated the public sphere, extending to the parliamentary Opposition who would on most issues be against anything her government did.

Identifying and invoking alternative discourses is a lot more subtle than (say) fact-checking of authoritarian populist and extremist messages with a view to discrediting them. Creative, bridge-building narratives that can resonate with problematic categories of citizens and diminish diabolical narratives are much harder work than that. There is plenty for such narratives to build on, not least the fact that democratic societies can do better than their authoritarian competitors on any number of dimensions—equality, freedom, environmental quality, internal peace, security, human development, innovation—that even citizens attracted by authoritarian populist discourses can value. The content of such narratives can and should be highly context-dependent. In the longer term, such narratives can help consolidate a broader coalition based on positive stories about why it is worthwhile to uphold democratic and deliberative norms. And the more such norms are upheld, the stronger the context becomes for the exercise of deliberative reason, and banishing the specter of citizen incompetence. This development in turn can help reinforce the macro-level deliberativeness of the public sphere. Such a virtuous cycle would in itself constitute at least partial transformation of the diabolical democratic soundscape.

The Critical Role of Democracy Activism

While the (re-)creation and preservation of robust discursive infrastructures as well as discursive bridges constitutes the backbone of our approach, the big question is how to get there, especially when discursive infrastructures are broken and institutional changes of the political and media landscape are hard (or impossible) to come by? Our answer is: democratic activism. Indeed, resistance is a key parameter in Weingast’s (1997) model of democratic stability: we need activists who name and shame communicative transgressions and simultaneously motivate more passive citizens to join in efforts to contain diabolical elite behavior. Guriev and Treisman (2022), too, argue that best response against competitive authoritarianism is “adversarial engagement.” Indeed, we can sometimes see movements committed to defending democratic norms. For example, in the Czech Republic, the “Million Moments for Democracy” movement in 2023 worked against a right-wing populist presidential candidate, but also advocated for principles such as fair and accountable representation. Such movements also “have a particular interest in defending the norms of the public sphere because (ideally) they make it possible for all actors, regardless of resources, to be heard” (Felicetti and Holdo, 2023: 11). They may not advocate for deliberative principles directly, but their actions indirectly help to restore a vital public sphere with alternative and better arguments, especially in the light of the misinformation spread by elite actors.

Systematic empirical research shows that activism and protest can help mobilize more passive constituents (such as young citizens) as well as reduce support for extremist parties (for the relevance of protest for democratic resilience, see, for example, Colombo et al., 2024; Ellinas and Lamprianou, 2024). While it may be futile to hope that citizens—especially in highly polarized contexts—will switch their vote to parties that they strongly dislike (Jacobs, 2024), activism and protest can bring new citizens into the political process that may help to contain the rise of authoritarian parties and leaders.

The focus on activists and movements for a more deliberative public sphere involves a return to a long-standing critical line in deliberative democracy, emphasizing critical thinking and arguing from below (Cohen and Arato, 1992; Habermas, 1996). But all this comes with a little irony. Iris Marion Young (2001) has prominently argued that activism and deliberative principles are in diametrical opposition. According to Young, there is a gap between deliberative aims, allegedly geared toward reason and consensus, and activist aims, geared toward challenging the status quo. But we think that Young’s argument needs to be reversed for current diabolical times: we actually need activists’ critical oppositional activity and contestation to restore a modicum of deliberative democracy in current declining public spheres. This is what has only slowly begun in the current US context, enabling Trump and his administration not only to dominate but also to manipulate political and public discourse.

A Systemic and Dynamic Approach to Democratic Repair

There is no fast or shortcut way to bring democracies in regression quickly back on track. If it is true that citizen incompetence is not hard-wired, then enhancing citizens’ reflective capacities in combination with macro-level “deliberativeness” in the public sphere as well as active resistance to transgressions of democratic norms can break the vicious communicative cycles that bedevil contemporary democracies and so provide the foundation for response to the diabolical challenges we have enumerated. This implies systemic thinking, where democracies are not saved by single (or best) interventions or by the good behavior of well-intentioned political elites, but by the transformation or preservation of discursive infrastructures setting constraints on a “diabolical soundscape.” Moreover, as emphasized by the foundational literature on deliberative democracy, better deliberative quality is an emergent phenomenon out of myriads of inputs in a system, where a higher level of rational argumentation and better listening are potential products of such a process (Bächtiger and Parkinson, 2019; Parkinson and Mansbridge, 2012). Barvosa (2018) demonstrates the communicative dynamics over time in her analysis of the struggle for LGBTQIA+ equality in the United States. There, numerous actions, narratives, and re-conceptualizations over several decades led to a cultural transformation and new understanding of gender, sexuality, and family (though that new understanding is under renewed attack in Trump’s America). Reviving democracy in diabolical times too is about numerous moves by different actors and especially democratic activists engaging in contestatory deliberation, that is, argumentatively challenging democratic transgressions, to generate a constraint on diabolical elite behavior.

Overall, “diablo” is clever and versatile, but it can be beaten by a multitude of acts from “below.” In the final Star Wars episode The Rise of Skywalker, General Pryde of the authoritarian First Order was baffled to learn that it wasn’t an army but just “ordinary people of the galaxy” successfully turning against the First Order. Similarly, “would-be authoritarians” might learn that citizens who were put in a position to see through the formers’ manipulations and reflect on the (long-term) consequences of authoritarian transgressions eventually strike back, put an end to these transgressions as well as implement a deliberative constraint, forcing future political actors to play according to minimal truthfulness and civility norms.