Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent and debate. -Hubert H Humphrey

It was a six story flight. The sterile concrete stairwell was stifling in the Beijing summer. Cigarette smoke was suspended in the humid air, wafting lazily around our heads as we made our way up.

Three of us trudged up together. Two suits followed behind. Relieved to finally make our destination, the three of us burst into the air-conditioned room to get a beer, and shut the door.

After cracking the beer, I wanted a smoke. A bad habit a lot of us picked up in China in the 1990s.

Being young and overly-confident, I decided to ask one of the two Ministry of State Security officials parked outside of the door if I could bum a cigarette. He leaned calmly against the railing, within a foot of the door. He showed no surprise when the door opened suddenly, and I asked in Mandarin to share a smoke. He stared coldly and slowly took another puff of his cigarette. I was neither getting a cigarette nor a response.

I’ve been told that the Chinese keep dossiers on all foreigners. If they didn’t have one on me already, I’m sure the week I spent that summer in Beijing with a Tian’anmen dissident — allowed home for the first time in years to visit his ailing mother — was cause to start. And, my dossier expanded greatly over the course of the next decade.

As a foreigner I was bold. Perhaps, too bold. But, the authorities pretty much left us alone. In some ways, living in China as a foreigner, felt more free than in America. There was no drinking age and at the time we could even smoke in the movie theaters (can you imagine?). The day-to-day regulations, at least for a foreigner, were minimal. The authoritarian regime did not influence us. I didn’t know what it meant to be afraid of your own government until that summer.

In the 1990s, while China had already opened its doors to the outside world, the internet era was just on its ascent, and foreign influence was more muted. The days of email and internet hacking/warfare had yet to color the landscape or define international relations.

With the introduction of the internet and its growing global economic influence, China’s authoritarianism became more apparent, at least to the outside world. The Great Firewall did its part to keep foreign influence from spreading to the masses. And, the Chinese were very adept at creating their own internet platforms, satisfying their citizens looking to engage in the social Media phenomenon.

WeChat substitutes for Twitter, Facebook, texting and much more. Nowadays you can pay for services via WeChat. And, WeChat’s most recent service even allows users in China to register for divorce. I would wager, even if the ban on Facebook was lifted, most Chinese would stick with WeChat. It is as social as Facebook with more benefits. A win for the Chinese Communist Party.

China’s biggest fear isn’t the United States with its tariffs and aircraft carriers. Its biggest fear is its own citizens rising in revolt. Of course, the U.S. could play a tangential role in such a scenario. China’s economy, since opening up to the world, is built on trade. Trade is what lifted post-Mao China to become the world juggernaut it is today.

After Mao, the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party is predicated on economic growth, not ideology. When their livelihood is threatened externally, the internal ramifications could be huge.

These fears have lead to severe crackdowns on the media. China’s state-run media plays a critical role in creating cohesion and promoting nationalism vis-à-vis the outside world, blocking any sentiment threatening state control. This is one way to ensure the minimization of political dissonance. The censors are always alert to any words or phrases that may in any way threaten the government and they quickly scrub them from the internet. For example “1989” — the year of the Tian’anmen Massacre — is on the censorship list, especially near its anniversary.

However, the Chinese have found unique ways to get around censorship. My favorite was “grass mud horse”. In Chinese, grass mud horse — 草泥马 cao ni ma — sounds very similar to quite a nasty obscenity (f*** your mother), which was directed at Chinese censors.

In America, it is well-documented that as our media outlets proliferated, our civil society and Community Engagement declined. So, should the state mediate our media? Trump’s attack on the media has lead many to decry what some perceive as a slide into authoritarianism.

Should we start to worry that a couple of suits will camp out on our porches (perhaps vaping authoritatively on an e-cigarette) in an overt show of censorship and control?

While there are some caught up in the hysteria of our changing world that have elicited as much, we’re not there yet. In fact, this hysteria is proof that our media remains open to print most anything ranging from racist rants to truly “fake” news, as recently evidenced in the case of the story of a Texas trooper raping a woman.

However, denigrating the media has done nothing to expand our national dialogue. Rather it serves to polarize and push us deeper into our echo chambers, and promote the filter bubble the internet created.

At one point in our history we had something called the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine required news outlets to address controversial issues, exploring both sides, in a balanced and objective view. This was implemented in 1949, long before the internet was even an idea. In 1987, the doctrine was abolished, stating:

The intrusion by the government into the content of programming occasions by the enforcement of the fairness doctrine restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters and actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public concern to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of the broadcast journalist.

The “intrusion of the government”, i.e. authoritarianism. In essence, the Fairness Doctrine was abolished in the name of democracy. That’s good, right?

And yet, as a friend recently surmised, if you don’t have true debate, you don’t have democracy. The proliferation of digital content came at a time when community engagement was already in decline. These two opposing phenomena worked in tandem to weaken genuine dialogue and debate and entrench our polarization.

We need to get back to honest debate, but in a highly partisan country also defined, more so than any other, by multiculturalism we face gridlock.

As Jay Cost notes in his article, If We Want A Pluralistic Society, We Will Need to Accept Gridlock:

When we look back to major policy initiatives such as the New Deal or the Great Society, or even to periods of relative political calm like the Dwight Eisenhower administration, we have to reckon with the fact that the United States was much more homogeneous then than it is now… A republic is supposed to reflect the shared values and beliefs of its people. So under the auspices of self-government, a country that is divided along geographic, racial, ethnic, economic, religious, and educational lines is probably going to produce gridlock.

To Make America Great (Again), we cannot rely on the recipes of the past. And while we may find some nostalgia with the perceived harmony of the past, nostalgic policies do not reflect current realities. They create discord.

On the upside, I see two things happening that buttress democracy. First, despite the growing individualism and multiculturalism that presently defines our society, and which proves democratic dialogue and debate difficult, we Americans — left, right and center — believe in democracy. Even if how we exercise it varies widely. Behind the scenes, a group called Patriots and Pragmatists is holding discussions, mainly in private, between both democrat and republican thinkers.

However, this initiative is currently exclusive to a handful of elites. Is this something we can bring to the people? Have our fears of democratic decline progressed enough that we will spend some time away from Twitter and reinvigorate community engagement and dialogue? Face-to-face in “real” life? Are we near a “tipping point” in our democracy?

That brings me to my second revelation. I see a shift in our generations. As I mentioned last week, Generation Z, born in a digital era, is perhaps more mature in how they use the internet. As something novel to us older generations, we flocked to it, its lure drawing us in for the long haul. It shifted how we engage.

In defiance of our digital culture, this new generation, craves something different. It is a maxim for new generations to rail against the old. Maybe this time, it’s a good thing.

Between our fears of authoritarianism and censorship — which seems to have done more to provide bipartisan cohesion than the myriad of ways we express democracy — and a generation reinventing community engagement, I don’t expect to be bumming cigarettes off a strongman outside my door any time soon. At least not in America.

Authoritarian Angst was originally published in The Ascent on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.