Independent Scotland must remake both democracy and the media

There are at least two theories of how modern power works on display here. Assange’s entire career is based on the premise that information sets the citizens free. To be able to see and read that your state is actually committing war crimes or secretly surveilling you is not just to be empowered, but emboldened.

As a result, you’ll demand (or even forge) better, more accountable structures of power.

What we saw in the presidential debate was a realm in which facts are invented to support a personality style (Trump’s swagger), and where the real impact on viewers is visceral, bodily and psychological (Biden’s decrepitude). The long TV debate matters much less than the “kill shot” clips that land and circulate on social media.

This isn’t Assange’s assumption of a rationalist citizenry, finally able to act and build their republic, the scales having fallen from their eyes. This is a screen-based maelstrom of feeling and affect, swirling around the prospects and competence of a “leader of the free world”.

I don’t downgrade the points of principle that are at stake in Assange’s release. Even his long-term supporters were surprised at the plea bargain that the US authorities agreed on. Assange pled guilty to a single criminal charge – conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents.

But while delighted, they’re also alarmed at what the specific conviction – a violation of the US Espionage Act – means for everyday investigative journalism.

The activities prosecuted were “receiving and obtaining” secret files, then “wilfully communicating” them “to persons not entitled to receive them”.

As Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, commented: “That is a ‘crime’ that journalists at mainstream outlets all over the US commit virtually every day.”

Yet the underlying paradigm here is that “facts” still matter to the citizenry. As expected, the fact-checkers on Trump’s claims in the presidential debate have had a field day.

“I had the best environmental numbers ever” – false. “There was no terror during my administration” – false. “We had the safest border in the history of our country” – false. “Immigrants are taking black jobs now” –false. And on and on.

Convicted felon and former US president Donald Trump

Yet there’s an element of support for Trump that is clearly willing to suspend their belief in journalistic process and legitimacy. Trump has shown brilliance, however intuitive, in framing the press as purveyors of “fake news”.

Here he’s exploiting what the American historian Richard Hofstadter once called, in the 1960s, the “paranoid style in American politics”. As the US political magazine The Hill summarises: “At its core, the paranoid style uses conspiracy to engage in subversion.

“The political paranoiac can’t stomach society as it is and thus seeks to destroy it under the guise of some looming threat, a deep state, Antifa, migrant caravans, transgender bathrooms, an international paedophile ring … Those taken with the paranoid style channel their victimhood by believing the world is one vast conspiracy.”

I’M sure that sounds familiar to the most casual politics watcher, wherever the culture wars dominate. And it certainly explains much of Trump’s appeal.

I also think it’s been aided and abetted by an educational era in which the ideas of postmodernism dominated. Postmodernism emphasises that the world which comes to us through our media is always a construct or a spectacle.

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(I recall the Glasgow Media Group in the 1980s bringing out painstaking accounts of UK mainstream TV’s bias and partiality. The lead titles were Bad News, More Bad News, Really Bad News – couldn’t Trump just as easily have chosen this term?)

Add to that culture of scepticism, the practical deconstructions (and reconstructions) enabled by the tools of digital media.

Take all those copies, cuts and clips that can be made with your thumbs at a bus stop. Not to mention the latest generative AI software, capable of “deep faking” reality. That means talking heads saying what you want them to say, or geography being simulated with increasing perfection.

Who thrives in such a slippery, mutable public sphere? There’s a quote from Hannah Arendt, the 20th-century German-American philosopher, that I see repeatedly cited these days. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist”, she wrote, “but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote on fascism

“Make America Great Again” is a concept exactly tailored for Arendt’s totalitarian subject. It’s neither fact nor fiction, neither true nor false –but a great and inchoate aspiration, a giant collective ethos. It implies action in the present, transcendence in the future, with a strong anchor in the past.

Trump is actually offering TrumpWorld – an entire social universe you can mentally and emotionally live in. This was anticipated by the famous Karl Rove statement, at the peak of the second Bush term.

He claimed journalists lived in “the reality-based community … you people believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”

“That’s not the way the world really works any more,” Rove continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.

“We’re history’s actors, And you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

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How could the frail Assange – to whom one would wish at least a few months of Oz-tastic poolside recreation with wife and children, after 12 years of miserable incarceration – be any counter-lesson to this looming leviathan?

It’s maybe not so much in his belief that “truth produces freedom” – but more in the political and philosophical anarchism that Assange has also professed.

In an age of intensifying scepticism about official politics and media, what is the level of social structure that citizens might find legitimate and trustworthy?

Here’s one suggestion. Our lives are already a miasma of clicks, responses and interactivity. Can’t we craft (and regulate) a stream out of all this, which helps us deliberate and shape the services and resources that affect our lives?

Instead of “bad” or “fake” news, maybe we generate “useful” news – information and opinion that substantiates our concrete decisions, educating our subsidiarity.

And if the root of the term “journalism” is “an account of the day”, perhaps we need instead a “projectism” – an account of what we need to guide our own material and social existence. Yes, I’m launching some fliers here. But I’m only trying to show that radical democrats can be just as imaginative as the authoritarian right.

And don’t we in Scotland still live “in the early days of a better nation”? However, I’m certainly urging a different set of objectives here than the usual “progress-by-competence” of our independence parties.

What if independence’s real achievement was to be a refashioning of how both democracy and media function in a new, small, smart nation? We can learn both from the coming horror of TrumpWorld – but also from the inventiveness and autonomy of a character like Assange.

I think we could prove Julian’s anarchist scepticism about the state wrong. Shall we try?