Chaos and the New American Identity: The Leadership Paradox

This is the third in a four-part series by Evolve Governance on American identity.

By Joe Long, Ilan Cooper, & Amanda Kadlec

As we outlined in the first two articles in our four-part series on Chaos and the New American Identity, the sense of what it means to be American is no longer a unifying concept around which the majority are willing or able to gather. The public’s reliance on algorithmic-driven social media messaging encouraging division on controversial issues has driven the country into separate thought universes. Political audiences are now surrounded with bespoke political narratives that reinforce homogenous and antagonistic ideologies, and the narratives of elected political leaders are outshined by that power. With the space for thoughtful discourse among the general public narrowing, we now question whether it is possible for political leadership to impart a new narrative for Americans that is inclusive enough to create some semblance of unity.

For more on how social media bots influence social bonding and identity formation, watch the segment by Deutsche Welle below.

Leader vs. Bot

As the nature of the citizen-state relationship changes, social media and the extremism it spawns has undercut leaders’ ability to frame messaging by interfering in their ability to have direct and effective communication with a constituency. Nefarious online influence in democratic societies like the United States, driven by both foreign and domestic actors, drowns out or deliberately misinterprets political leadership’s intended messaging. The gap between the modern leader and the public is thereby increased and, ultimately, the ability to develop a unifying concept of American social identity, a fundamental aspect of nation-state stability, is diminished.

In framing the nexus between leadership and social identity, psychologist and leadership scholar Viviane Seyranian reminds us that a leader’s ability to communicate shapes the “role of implicating social identity…that strives to mobilize follower support for social change.” Therefore, social identity construction, in this case American social identity, remains an ever-shifting composition shaped by leader narratives. Moreover, leaders use strategic messaging to shape a values-based “vision” to various groups of followers through a process of “unfreezing” and “re-freezing”pluralistic social identities across a broad political audience to create a desired social identity that remains resistant to change. Moreover, messaging that includes “inclusive language and positive social identity increase[s] ratings of leader charisma” and has a positive impact on “followers’ social identification, environmental values, ingroup injunctive norms, and self-stereotypes.” This phenomenon is captured in historically prototypical leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. who used oratory skills replete with visionary and emotionally charged speech to re-shape and subsequently re-freeze social identities that lasted over multiple generations. This historical approach to social influence through rhetorical persuasion is fast becoming obsolete for modern political leaders as technology and social media influence outweigh the influential power of the public speaker.

A leadership paradox subsequently emerges. The qualities of free and open political debate in democratic societies and the corresponding power of free speech are threatened by bot-driven messaging. Political leaders struggling to drive contemporary political thinking are increasingly limited by the iron grip of tailor-made bot-driven narratives amid accusations of censorship and repression by the very public they are trying to influence. The more that leaders in free societies attempt to direct that narrative, the more enabled are malignant social media actors to reframe these attempts as a deep-state conspiracy to silence free thought and speech. The harder that leaders of free societies try to counter competing narratives, the more authoritarian they seem to an unsuspecting public.

Alternatively, authoritarian leaders within closed-regimes are able to control internet and media messaging in a manner that projects authority. In The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, Bueno de Mesquita and Smith argue that authoritarian rulers require fewer loyal stakeholders than democratic leaders by requiring a smaller “winning coalition” necessary for staying in power. Thus, authoritarian regimes are much less affected by the leadership paradox. The political messages of authoritarian rulers are highly resistant to social media influence as their political capital is less-rooted in the need for public support and their control of messaging, even through online sources, is much greater.

The Asymmetric Messaging Battlefield

Unfortunately, the freedom-control dilemma that modern social and political leaders face in attempting to manage the deleterious effects of social media is further muddied by the predatory efforts of America’s adversaries. Using advanced bots, driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, adversarial state and non-state actors are better able to capitalize on the increasing division within the American identity and create fake social media messages that “unfreeze”, adjust, and then “re-freeze” social identities in ways that are imperceptible to most Americans. For the tens of millions of captured in the bot-dominant social media web that capitalizes on their individual biases, many have embodied the idea that their own American identity is incompatible with the identities of others.

When this happens, the threat to America’s future is seemingly found internally within the system. Meanwhile, external threats often go ignored or unaddressed by political leaders. These same leaders are becoming increasingly unable to provide credible counter-narratives on any topic of domestic or foreign policy that are capable of competing with, or in, the social media space. The rapid spread of biased messaging, misinformation, and misdirection through prolific reposting and retweeting reinforces false narratives and incorrect status quo thinking, while simultaneously rejecting the validity of competing leader narratives.

The battle between leadership and social media messaging may be seen as akin to the power struggles among nation-states seeking to defeat weaker actors in conflict settings. Work by conflict scholars like Andrew Mack and Ivan Arreguin-Toft outlines the means by which strong state actors effectively lost to weaker, non-state actors. Citing asymmetric warfare case studies of the Cold War, such as Vietnam for the United States, or Afghanistan for the Soviet Union, they argue the technological advances that made superpower military units stronger also made them more vulnerable to exploitation by less powerful, technologically inferior enemies.

A similar argument holds for the United States in its battle with bots. Rapid technological advances have created inexpensive alternatives that now provide leverage to non-state and sub-state actors intent on disrupting the political stability of powerful democratic nation-states. Leadership power in democracies is, at least on the surface, appearing diminished, while autocracies and dictatorships appear relatively immune. This naturally poses existential challenges for the future of democratic governance from within as well as without.

Innovative Solutions from Leadership

The decreased influence of leadership offline helps to explain how combative and misinformed competing narratives complicate the formation of a unifying identity in today’s America. As political leaders are becoming increasingly unable to shape the social identity, the chaotic fracturing of the American identity remains unchecked.

Visionary leaders can no longer afford to launch their messages to constituents with the hope that consistency will eventually pay off. Rather, leaders must take a more longitudinal and multidisciplinary approach in the same way that conventional armies would adjust to asymmetric conflict environments. Without sounding overly alarmist, leaders in democracies need to reimagine solutions to the challenges of modern strategic communication. Any struggles that previous generations may have faced with propaganda and misinformation are greatly outpaced by this emerging phenomenon that has rapidly chipped away at the American identity over the past decade.

Fortunately, solutions to this emerging problem are not as problematic as they might seem considering bot-driven media thrives on consumer ignorance. Just as posters from WW II reminded society to beware enemy eavesdropping with catchy slogans such as ‘loose lips sink ships,’ and educational efforts of the ’70s and ’80s sought to warn children about ‘stranger danger’ and to ‘say no to drugs,’ a similarly credible awareness-raising format warning of the dangers of adversary-led bot-driven manipulation is a necessary first step. ‘Pepsi-challenge’-like social demonstrations help to underscore the reality that most Americans cannot accurately discern bot-driven from human-written articlesand recognize them as the real ‘fake news.’ Some lawmakers, such as Representatives Tom Malinowski and Anna G. Eshoo, are introducing legislation to check the power of algorithmic amplification of extremist messaging and its corrosive impact on society and domestic stability.

This is a move in the right direction. The challenge is that the power social media platforms wield has given rise to radically intense strategic messaging competition that has already frozen users into a narrative. National level legislation must be created and enforced, and elected officials from the county board to the Senate have to be willing to challenge false narratives and beliefs that are driven by bots and proliferated by their constituents. Most importantly, individual leaders have to listen to their own internal moral compasses about whether or not to buy into and propagate falsehoods for political gain. This is where the leader’s paradox gets even trickier for a democracy. America’s lawmakers need the voters, tens of millions of them, to propel them to their leadership roles. To challenge the frozen narrative risks political suicide, but to not do so propagates a continued fracturing of the American identity and its democracy.

Rolling back the clock in the hopes of rebuilding the good ol’ days of leadership messaging is a fool’s errand. The real challenge for tomorrow’s emerging leaders is to build coping mechanisms that work with emerging technology to shape an American identity that reflects the world’s reality through a solitary American identity that respects a balance between diversity and individuality. And yet, today’s leaders in the White House, Congress, government bureaucracies, and at the state and local level are responsible for respecting that balance. America is at a critical moment where leadership must innovate solutions to redefine this space, commit to such solutions, and constantly adapt if the country is to remain stable, democratic, and safe from those that seek to destroy it from within. As with other emerging technologies, changes to American society’s framework will inevitably continue. It is what we do about these changes in the immediate future that will define where we go from here and how we will shape American identity for years to come.

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