Democratic Alarmism: Coherent Notion or Contradiction in Terms?

Political agents are alarmist when they exaggerate or confabulate serious threats to the commonweal. Leaders typically engage in alarmism—which I will be treating as synonymous with “fearmongering” and “scaremongering”—to elicit fear in the public and thereby modulate its behavior and beliefs. For instance, a government might inflate the risks associated with climate change to sway public opinion and secure a mandate for ecological policy reforms. A raft of theorists from across the political spectrum take alarmism to be a necessary feature of any functioning democracy, that is, necessary for the preservation and well-being of the polity. This is somewhat surprising given that alarmism appears to be starkly undemocratic, specifically insofar as it contravenes the principle of collective self-determination. Alarmism prima facie violates this principle because it involves deception and emotional manipulation. People cannot be said to be choosing for themselves when they deliberate under the influence of panic and misinformation. Mearsheimer (2011, 55) has gone so far as to describe the practice as “antidemocratic at its core.” But if alarmism is politically necessary, then this would create a deep tension between the basic value commitments that condition democracy and the real political practice of regimes that self-identify as democratic. Yet, almost none of the democratic theorists who posit alarmism as a necessity acknowledge this tension, let alone explore how it might be resolved.1 The following study therefore examines the conflict between alarmism and democracy, and then sketches how in some cases we might be able to pacify this antagonism. I reject Mearsheimer's claim that alarmism is intrinsically undemocratic, arguing instead that under certain conditions, the practice can be rendered broadly consistent with a democratic commitment to collective self-determination. I begin by drawing some relevant distinctions between different types of alarmism (Section 2). This clarifies the specific form of alarmism that I will be arguing has democratic potential. In Section 3, I then outline why many commentators consider alarmism to be a political necessity. In Section 4, I assess the arguments in favor of Mearsheimer's view that political alarmism is inherently undemocratic. These boil down to the objection that deception and emotional manipulation—both of which are integral to alarmism—apparently contravene the democratic principle of collective self-determination. In the final section (Section 5), however, I argue that if the right forms of community consent are obtained, alarmism does not necessarily violate the principle of collective self-determination. This section also considers the institutional pathways by which this consent might be secured. Since the required institutions, though not currently in place, seem to be perfectly feasible, I conclude that democratic alarmism is a coherent notion. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines an “alarmist” as someone “characterized by a tendency to exaggerate potential dangers” (Oxford English Dictionary 1989). For our purposes, it is worth expanding upon this definition, first off because the OED does not specify that alarmist exaggeration—or what is technically called “threat inflation”—can take a variety of distinct forms. For instance, it can involve presenting a given threat as more severe than the well-informed alarmist takes to be truly the case. In this way, a political leader might exaggerate by warning the public that a virus spreading through the population has a mortality rate of 5%, even though they believe the actual rate to be closer to 1%. But alarmist exaggeration might also consist in presenting a given threat as closer in space or time than the alarmist believes to be the case. For instance, they might present an approaching army as geographically nearer than they believe it to actually be, or they might claim that particular consequences of global warming are likely to arise sooner than expert advice has led them to believe. Another form this exaggeration might take is probabilistic. An alarmist political agent might lead citizens to believe that a worst-case scenario is more likely than the available information indicates, or they might present a merely possible scenario as inevitable unless certain policy changes are pushed through at short notice. This kind of exaggeration often takes the form of simply warning people that they're exposed to the risk of a worst-case scenario without mentioning the relative likelihood of milder possible scenarios. As Sunstein (2002, 43–47) has shown, if a worst-case scenario is sufficiently shocking, people tend to massively overestimate its likelihood in comparison to milder competing scenarios. 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