On December 29th, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt coined a phrase for the United States of America. The Arsenal of Democracy. The United States of America, the world’s largest economy, and the world’s greatest hyperpower, with cultural, technological, diplomatic, and military domination on a scale never seen before in the 4.543 billion years of earth’s existence. We are the world’s premier democratic power, the one with the most influence to protect and foster the development of new democratic powers. The United States is the leader of the free world, the leader of the democratic west, and the spokesperson of democracy. What the United States has managed to accomplish in the 248 years of its existence is something to be proud and patriotic about.
The Arsenal of Democracy is being rocked at its foundations from the combined forces of hate, polarization, and misinformation, disinformation, & malinformation.
Hate
Hate, what is hate? According to the United Nations, hate speech refers to offensive language/discussion targeting a group or individual based on their characteristics. These groups include political groups, like Republicans and Democrats, gender, like men and women, religion, ethnicity, language, culture, and more. Hate is an intense passion or dislike of others, and it’s an emotional response, and all it does is harm the country. With hate, we see others that are different from us as alien, people we can’t get along with, can’t compromise with, can’t talk to. Discussion between groups becomes adversarial, both sides want to win, no one wants to admit defeat, most importantly, no one wants to compromise. Hate results in a lack of progress, the country remains gridlocked in infighting because both sides vehemently dislike each other, making compromise with the “enemy” impossible. Hate also serves to dehumanize people. With hate comes new language and rhetoric. For example, let us look at undocumented immigrants. One group may call them undocumented immigrants, a term that is neutral in essence. Meanwhile, another group will use the term, illegal immigrant, or, illegal alien. Both of these terms are meant to portray these people in a different light, to invoke emotions to arouse a response from people. The world illegal paints a group as criminal, as a problem. The term alien serves to dehumanize a person, painting them not as human, but as something else, something different from us and not a legitimate person. The thing is, the majority of the people that will fall under the term “illegal alien” may not be illegal. Their only crime may be entering the country in an illegal manner, but most do not have criminal history. Hate can become generalized too, so our hate for undocumented immigrants may extend to latinos, and further. Hate leads to more hate and it creates unfair and false narratives. It even has real world consequences. On February 8th, 2025, Jocelynn Rojo Carranza, an 11 year old girl from Texas, died five days after she was found unresponsive by her parents in her home. She was driven to take her own life, driven to suicide, by her peers who were infected by anti-immigrant hate. She was reportedly bullied for her family’s immigration status, and classmates targeted Hispanic classmates, threatening and floating the idea that ICE would come for them and their families, and deport them. While it can be argued that the children spreading the rumors and leading the bullying did not mean it, what doesn’t change is the fact that an environment of hate exists that created this situation in the first place, and other situations that involve hate.
Hate allows for the unthinkable to become thinkable. Let me tell you a short long story. Born on the 20th of April, 1889 in the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, Adolf Hitler would rise to national prominence in the Weimar Republic, officially known as the Deutsches Reich, aka German Reich. The German populus, reeling from a defeat in 1919, was susceptible to the rise and effects of hate. Acceptance of their loss in war wasn’t an easy pill to swallow, and a much easier way to cope, was and is through blame. Adolf, a man who had a burning passion for those not deemed Aryan, began to demonize the Jewish, Roma, Slavs, and other groups. He gave Germans a group to blame, a group to hate. This hatred would spread throughout Germany, and it made the German population open to extremism and radical action. Hate spurred a sense of urgency to take immediate action. Hate allowed Hitler to become Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, and allowed him to seize authoritative control. Concentration camps were set up, minority businesses and homes were targeted, and friendships and communities were destroyed. As the Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass played out in the streets of Germany, where attacks targeted Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes, Ruth Rack recalled seeing someone she saw as a friend, someone who invited them to their home for festivities and who was invited in return, someone who shared food and received food in return, in the mob who was attacking them for who they were. Hate broken friendships. Hate allowed and encouraged violence, and plunged Europe into years of war fueled by hate, leaving the continent stained by billions of drops of blood and the bodies of 20 million souls.
Hate is a cancer, it feeds itself by altering the mind of whoever it infects and creating more hate which spreads and spreads. We need to be aware of hate, because if we are not careful, bad comes.
Polarization & Partisanship
Polarization is when attitudes, beliefs, and feelings move away from the center, towards the extremist ends. For example, a liberal group may become more polarized in their political beliefs, and instead of following a classical liberal agenda, may move towards a communist one. A conservative group may become more polarized and move towards a more fascist agenda. Partisanship is a prejudice (an adverse or hostile action towards a group or individual based on their characteristics) in favor of a particular cause or group. This can include a blind following of a party, faction, cause, or person.
Polarization and partisanship on their own pose problems, but when combined, serve to destabilize and create tension. Polarization has an effect on the way people see other groups. We tend to categorize others, something our brain has encouraged to make understanding an individual or group easier for it. (Our brain likes shortcuts, and a way to achieve that is through shortcuts) As polarization increases, we begin to see other groups as enemies, not adversaries. This distinction is important, adversaries are someone you compete with but who you could work with. “Today’s adversary could be tomorrow’s ally.” An enemy is someone who you need to destroy, someone who you cannot compromise with, and if you or your enemy does win…an election for example, you’re going to rewrite the rules to make sure they can’t win. A more polarized society sees a lack of cooperation among opposing sides. Legislation becomes difficult or possible to pass, such as constitutional amendments that require an absolute majority. Foreign policy may flip flop from administration to administration, threatening what we’ve built. There is no compromise, and people pick teams and stick with them no matter what. Today, Americans are more polarized than ever. The share of Americans who hold polarized political views has doubled since the last twenty years, from 11% to 21% in 2014. People are no longer as willing to dabble in the water of the opposite party as they were before. Instead of sometimes voting for Republicans, a liberal will instead vote for Democratic candidates more often, and the same goes for a conservative. People’s views are also growing more extreme. Republican views are growing more conservative, and Democratic views are growing more liberal. We see this in other avenues, such as some supporting a full ban on most guns while others support complete unrestricted access to firearms. Or, people supporting total annihilation of public health care options like Medicaid, or people supporting free healthcare. Polarization in society is a major issue like the enemy mentality we develop as a result and it weakens center/centrist positions, while rewards extremist views. A line is created, between “us” and “them”. We’ll work to weaken “them” through attacks on their positions, demonization, and more. This weakens Democracy and it allowed Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to come into existence. Polarized thinking also is incredibly difficult to reverse. People don’t like to admit when they are wrong, and that’s a problem. Polarization encourages the rejection of facts that go against your values and that challenge your beliefs. In recent years, this effect of polarization has been seen. For example, people will defend the economic disruptions caused by their party due to the policy they introduced even if there is overwhelming evidence that goes against that policy. Partisanship makes Polarization worse. We only side with our party and refuse to work, listen, and cooperate with different sides when we are partistan. This makes it easier for us to become more polarized. It makes the other side more partisan and polarized in return, which threatens democracy.
We need to be aware of our own partisanship and polarized thinking. People must be open to listening to opposing viewpoints. We must hold discussions and welcome challenges to our thinking and ideas. By changing our thinking, by welcoming discussion and through listening to whom we go against, and by recognizing if we are polarized and acting in a partisan way, we can fight against polarization and partisanship which endangers our democracy and our country’s social and political fabric.
Mis- & Dis- & Mal- Information
It shouldn’t have to be said that Mis- & Dis- & Mal- information is harmful. The problem is, what constitutes mis-, dis-, and mal- information? According to the Government of Canada, misinformation is false or inaccurate information that is not meant to cause harm, but is still inaccurate and false in its content. The problem with this is while there was no intention, it still spread bad information and informed people based on it. Disinformation is false information that is purposely intended to manipulate, cause damage, and guide people, organizations, and countries in the wrong direction. Malinformation is info that stems from a truth and is based on fact, but it is used out of context in order to mislead and harm. Disinformation, malinformation, and even misinformation changes a person’s views, invokes an emotional response, and affects what we perceive as important, even if it is not. For example, the current presidential administration, (2025), reported that 238 of deportees to the Salvadorian prison were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, but further investigation by news agencies resulted in the overwhelming majority of them, 90%, have no criminal charges or convictions. This is an example of disinformation because this falsehood that these immigrants were gang members were purposely shared by the government. The intention was to manipulate the public into being onboard with the deportations by categorizing them as “terrorists”, even if they weren’t. It makes the public think that these immigrants should’ve been deported because they were gang members, and it makes it easier for people to make an irrational belief that all immigrants are criminals.
But the question still remains, what constitutes mis-, dis-, and mal- information? Think about it. There is a simple definition for each type of information (which from now on I’ll be referring to as bad-information for simplicity’s sake), but each person will hold their own views on which piece of information, article, story, constitutes bad-information or trustworthy information based on the information that they have seen themselves. The problem is the information that decides whether a person should investigate or treat bad-information differently can itself be bad-information. Bad-information encourages people to follow and search out more bad-information. A person won’t give a second thought to information that aligns with their viewpoints even if it is wrong because, to them, it seems right. People want to be right, want their beliefs to be validated, and as a result, look for information that supports them while casting factual information that goes against them to the side. Combine this with the research, like The Alan Turing Institute, that states that it is hard to change a person’s beliefs even when faced with facts that disprove their beliefs, bad-information makes this problem worse. Bad-information encourages people to develop beliefs that aren’t backed by facts and data, bad-information makes it harder than it would normally be to change a person’s view, and it leads to a more polarized state facing growing hatred. If we think something is right based on the information we have seen and what others that we surround ourselves with say, we are not going to challenge that piece of information because we assume it’s right. That means that information that we think is right but may be wrong will be used to examine other information in the future, creating a feedback loop. This means we’re going to become dead set on our beliefs and it’ll become harder for us to change our thoughts because bad-information says we are right. This bad-information can influence the creation of hate, cause us to see other groups in a polarized light, and lead to more bad-information being made.
Closing
Every article published under my name has a purpose for its generation. This article doesn’t stray from this fact. The thing is, this article isn’t meant to provide the solutions. It is meant to scan and notify you on the malignant tumor that escapes the mind of the everyday person, coverage from the media, and talk and worries of political figures. Ask yourself, how often do you think about hate and its effects? How often do you think about polarization & partisanship? How often do you think about bad-information? Do you, or have you ever thought about it? We need to recognize that this is a very real problem we’re seeing in the Arsenal of Democracy, and it only seems to be getting worse as time goes on. How we choose to respond, we choose the change we need to make, and you have to spearhead your own change and acknowledgement.
Hate gives way to more hate, which has very real consequences on people and this country. A hate crime occurs every hour in the United States, and in the 2024 election, hate speech levels were 50% up. As Reverend Hank Tuell stated, “It’s the demonization of the different, And it’s seeming to get much more ingrained in the everyday person.” We learn to hate those different from us and hate makes it easier for us to align with extreme organizations and values, giving right of way to polarization. Hate of the rights that African Americans were achieving allowed the Klu-Klux-Klan to arise. In less “big” ways, it creates an environment of being unable to cooperate and listen to opposing sides, which is a core component of Democracy. When people believe they are right, people distort, rush to spread info that isn’t necessarily true, or create their own information to fit their beliefs and to convert others to agreeing with them when facts don’t support their views. We need to hold discussions on these problems and recognize that, in fact, this is something we need to be concerned about. We need to realize it exists.
Democracy won’t exist if action is not taken to defend it. We are fortunate to live in a country where we can protect our rights, our life, our liberties, and pursue happiness. The United States of America is not perfect, and it’ll never ever be perfect, but it doesn’t have to be. What we can do is try. As President Abraham Lincoln stated, this is a government “…Of the people, for the people, and by the people.” The people dictate what happens to our country. The people dictate whether we welcome polarization and partisanship, whether we embrace hate, and whether we listen to and spread mis- & dis- & mal- information. That is not the decision of a politician to make, but it is the decision of society, the decision of you. We can oppose those who bring and encourage misinformation, polarization, and hate at any time because it is our decision to make. We choose to align ourselves in the way we do. The choice to change starts with us.
The choice starts with you.
