Can democracy survive information overload?

[Commentary] The inescapable, overwhelming and disorienting flurry of activity of news, which has become the new normal since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, begs two simple but profound questions: Can democracy survive information overload? And can it survive a president who knows how to use the resulting chaos to dodge democratic accountability?

Democracy requires “informed consent” of the governed. Citizens need to have some idea of what’s going on if they want to hold elected officials accountable. But when five bombshells explode each day, citizens shrug in resignation, and soon they’re letting once-unacceptable behavior slide.The biggest challenge to democracy in the 21st century is that uninformed voters are being replaced by misinformed ones. Uninformed people rarely vote. Misinformed people do — and often vote to blow up the system based on their misconceptions of it.

Usually, democracy withers when there is too little information, strangled by autocratic control or dictatorial censorship. President Trump — that perpetual motion machine of news — is proving, day after crazy day, that democracy can also be suffocated by too much.

[Brian Klaas is a fellow in global politics at the London School of Economics.]