Doubts about the wisdom of the masses are as old as philosophy itself. Yet interest in democracy’s “epistemic” merits has surged in the last decade—and it is no mystery why. Democracy is collapsing around us in large part for epistemic reasons: because so many people have become so profoundly detached from reality.

Why did “protesters” storm the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021? Because they believed something demonstrably false: that the election had been “stolen.” Why did a majority of Americans vote for the would-be dictator who promoted this lie three years later? At least in part, again, because many of them believed obviously false things: e.g., that the economy was worse than it was; that crime was more widespread, trans athletes more numerous, and migrants more violent. All evidence to the contrary, some believed Trump would end the Gaza war, or bring prices down, or stand up for workers, or deport only violent criminals, or release the Epstein files, or back down on tariffs, or retreat from Project 2025. And while a few former supporters have turned against him as these fantasies have run aground on the shoals of reality, the vast majority still live in what can only be described as an alternate universe—either entirely unaware of his assault on virtually every institution that makes their lives better, or entirely deluded about its consequences.

It is thus not surprising that questions of “political epistemology” have returned to the fore. On the individual level, we are right to worry about the epistemic impact of motivated reasoning, cognitive biases, and “political ignorance.” And at the systemic level, we are right to lament the rise of talk radio, cable news, social media, and the attention economy, along with the corresponding decline of local news, professional journalism, content standards, and so on. Trends in our political economy have indeed conspired with underlying human frailties to undermine the epistemic foundations of a stable and functioning democracy—even in its most minimal form.

Yet this diagnosis is also crucially incomplete, in ways that distort our search for solutions. When we understand the problem in epistemic terms, we naturally seek epistemic answers: better fact-checking, more deliberation, better education, greater media balance. We aim to develop the “civic” and “epistemic virtues” of unbiased, fair-minded citizens. And indeed, such projects are surely worth pursuing. The epistemic failures they aim to address have deeper roots in our political psychology, however—and overcoming them requires grappling with those roots more directly.

In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities: i.e., the many cross-cutting social groupings we feel affinity with. And as long as we do not account for this profound and pervasive dependence, our attempts to address the epistemic failures threatening contemporary democracies will inevitably fall short. More than any particular institutional, technological, or educational reform, promoting a healthier democracy requires reshaping the social identity landscape that ultimately anchors other democratic pathologies.

Of course, a claim this big cannot be fully substantiated in the space of a blog post. Still, the point is important enough to be worth stating sharply and concisely, if only to provoke further discussion. (For more, see my book and related articles, along with the many other sources linked in this piece).

To begin with, modern humans cannot make quality judgments about the vast majority of things we need to know using only our own direct experience. Instead, we mostly trust what others tell us. The difference between epistemic success and epistemic failure, then, is whether we trust the right people at the right times. And this is where social identity comes in.

In theory, we could make such decisions rationally: i.e., by examining various information sources, evaluating their performance, and continuously updating our beliefs about their relative reliability. And it may often feel like that is what we are doing. The evidence, however, tells a different story. In study after study, our judgments about which sources to trust turn out to be systematically biased by a “psychological immune system” that functions to protect our identities—leading us to seek out, perceive, trust, and remember information that affirms the status of the groups we identify with, while ignoring, mistrusting, and forgetting that which contradicts or threatens our identities. (And yes, this includes the most educated, well-trained, and apparently rational among us).

To be clear, this process is far from deterministic. Everyone always has many social identities at once, and these overlap and intersect in a variety of unique ways. (Some, such as race, gender, or political party, may be well-defined, easily identifiable categories, while others are more indefinite or vague—consisting of a largely ineffable sense of who “people like me” are.) As in other domains, plasticity declines with age, but the identities we embrace, along with their salience and meaning, can continue to shift throughout our lives. Identities are thus susceptible to being shaped and mobilized by others—and indeed, this is the effect, if not the intent, of much political strategy. Nor are individuals themselves without agency in this process: while many identities are unchosen, others may be consciously embraced or renounced, and all admit of various interpretations.

Still, much about our social identification is not a matter of fully rational, autonomous choice. We do not generally decide which groups to identify with on the basis of their epistemic credentials regarding political questions. And even if we were to use such a standard, our judgments about which groups satisfy it would be inescapably colored by our pre-existing identities, formed on other bases or inherited from childhood. Developing certain “epistemic virtues” may mitigate some of our blind spots, finally, but it is hubris to think anyone can escape such biases entirely. Like it or not, it is a basic fact of human cognition that we think and act politically as members of social groups.

Indeed, this explains why all of our reasonably successful epistemic practices are collective in nature—relying not primarily on individual-level rationality, but on social structures calibrated to correct for individual limitations. That is ultimately the function of the professional norms and procedures that govern scientific research, qualitative and humanistic scholarship, journalism, legal and administrative proceedings, and a host of other intersubjective truth-making practices.

Even at their best, such systems make idiosyncratic errors and reflect certain biases. And at times, they may be distorted in more serious ways that systematically undermine their accuracy. Today, however, that is not the most urgent epistemic problem we face. At least for now, that is, plenty of accurate research, reporting, and legal reasoning is still produced—and if anything, it is more widely available than ever. The trouble is not that reliable collective truth-making practices no longer exist, but that significant portions of the population no longer trust them—and that as a result, the truths they establish no longer constrain those in power.

What has gone wrong? Why have so many people lost trust in collective epistemic practices whose reliability—while still imperfect—has not gotten measurably worse? And what could restore their trust, enabling the sort of collectively shared reality that a healthy democracy requires?

A common approach to these questions seizes on the fact that many citizens’ epistemic practices are suboptimal—suggesting (quite plausibly) that they would not believe so many false things if they had better epistemic habits. The logical solution is thus to improve these habits: by educating for media literacy and critical thinking; by making better information more widely accessible; by creating more opportunities for deliberation with a wider range of people; by inculcating civic or epistemic virtues. And these are all valuable projects. Indeed, if they achieved their aims in full—dramatically improving citizens’ epistemic practices—our problems would likely be solved.

Attending carefully to the socially motivated character of political cognition, however, suggests a different approach. For one, it makes the outcome ostensibly sought by these epistemic reforms seem vanishingly unlikely—and thus casts doubt on the wisdom of relying on them to restore a shared democratic reality. As this perspective emphasizes, after all, we have no reason to think that previous generations of democratic citizens were any more epistemically virtuous than their peers today. What made them more successful, rather—at least in the ways that count for sustaining a shared political reality—is that their imperfectly rational habits nevertheless led them to trust genuinely reliable collective epistemic practices. They benefitted from a form of “epistemic luck,” whereby the social groups they happened to identify with generally led them in the right direction.

What best explains contemporary epistemic failures, conversely, is not the decay of individual epistemic virtues, but the growing chasm between reliable collective truth-making practices and the social identities embraced by large numbers of people. And as a result, the only feasible way out of the mess we are in is not to ensure every citizen employs optimal epistemic practices, but to weaken their social identification with cranks and conspiracy theorists, and strengthen their identification with the broadly reliable collective practices of science, scholarship, journalism, law, and so on. The most visible manifestations of the problem might be epistemic, in other words, but its roots lie in social identity. And the most promising solutions will therefore tackle those roots.

To say that such solutions are more “feasible” or “promising” than the alternatives, of course, is not to say they will be easy to implement. Indeed, once we acknowledge that the ultimate target for intervention is a pathological landscape of social identity formations—rather than the availability of good information or opportunities to deliberate with fellow citizens—our task becomes significantly more daunting. Properly conceived, restoring the epistemic foundations for a minimally functioning democracy requires nothing less than changing who people are: how they conceive of themselves, which identities they embrace and find most salient, and how they interpret those identities.

This is not only exceedingly difficult, practically speaking; it also presents complex moral challenges. After all, shaping and mobilizing the social identities of others is itself an exertion of power that may be dangerous in its own right, even in the hands of well-motivated actors seeking democratic ends. It must therefore be carefully justified in theory, and subjected to guardrails in practice. Daunting as it may be, however, the task of shaping identity is not impossible. Indeed, rather than inspiring despair, recognizing the transformation of social identity as the most critical priority for democratic reform should give us hope—for at least we will be addressing the right target. And while much remains to be explored, existing research does highlight places to start.

Occasionally, a gifted leader can bring about substantial transformations using solely the rhetorical and performative tools of mass politics. Yet notably, the style of the most effective identity-oriented appeals is often rather different from the belief-oriented forms of persuasion we typically expect in politics. Making persuasive arguments within a shared deliberative space is a very different task than inviting people into that space to begin with—and it is the latter that is most urgently required today. Rather than flooding swing states with a tidal wave of talking points that are inevitably tuned out by those who need to hear them, effective campaigns of democratic renewal will thus focus on reshaping the meaning of certain identities that have been captured by anti-democratic forces—such as rurality or masculinity—and shifting the relative salience of others—such as class.

Meanwhile, the most reliably successful efforts to transform the social identities of large numbers of adults, in a democratic direction, operate outside the realm of mass politics altogether. Instead, they are nearly always rooted in ongoing face-to-face relationships, within organizations whose purposes are not, at least in the first instance, directly political. After all, the target audience is not the “usual suspects” who show up to political meetings. To rebuild collective identification across difference—solidarity, in other words—people must first have other reasons to work with and trust one another. Only then can social identity begin to shift, bringing diversified media consumption, epistemic openness, and ultimately a revised political consciousness, along with it.

The classic location for this sort of “organizing” is labor unions, which have always played a central role in the expansion and consolidation of democracy. And despite the sustained attacks against it, workplace organizing still has a unique ability to bring diverse people together in pursuit of common aims: a revived labor movement must therefore be a central part of any project of democratic renewal. In addition, however, solidarity, civic capacity, and collective power must be built along other lines as well, fostering collective identification around shared concerns such as debt, housing, or the environment, as well as common religious, artistic, or even athletic commitments.

To be sure, describing what it would take to save democracy is far easier than actually doing it. Yet insofar as it is part of the job of the political theorist, the least we can do is get it right.

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