which do we prefer, the uncertainty of democratic freedom, or the predictability of authoritarianism?

Because of the open communication it offers, a democracy can’t protect itself from all the consequences of unfettered expression. The incentives born out of this circumstance can be perverse. It means that anything is possible, because anyone can say anything, and therefore anyone can be convinced of anything. To suggest that everything is

John Dewey, the American pragmatist, is instructive here. No one wrestled with the relationship between democracy and education as well or as deeply as he did. But Dewey never succumbed to Romanticism or apologetics. He looked democracy in the face, acknowledged its near-impossible demands, and asked how we might improve it. Culture and

To be a democratic citizen is to be continually at the mercy of a communication environment full of Sophists, swindlers, and tools of distortion. In a democracy, this comes with the territory—and that’s okay. However, it follows that education in the arts, in the deployment and understanding of rhetoric, in media history, and even in public

What we really mean by media literacy is a total understanding of communication technologies and the rhetorical techniques on which they rely. Again, democracy runs on persuasion, and so much turns on the ability of citizens to recognize when and how they’re being influenced. Tremendous work has been done on the role of civics

In a consumer world rife with choices, everyone must be their own intellectual self-defense system. There’s no way around this in a democratic society; ultimate responsibility falls to the people. Public opinion is perpetually vulnerable to hysteria and mass manipulation—from opportunistic politicians, from attention merchants, from corporate

To justify itself, democracy need only do two things: provide space for free expression and the opportunity to check power. Autocracies offer the virtue of stability at the cost of freedom, necessitating arbitrary rule. Oligarchies degenerate into corruption and can’t provide the basis for an active civic life. Only democracy offers a form of life

Indeed, the past decade has been a reminder that democracy has no essence or shape; it is simply open society and its consequences.

The Birther campaign was never about proving Obama’s Kenyan birth or removing him from office. As Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum have pointed out, when it comes to conspiracies, “the power to make people affirm the message is the power to impose reality.”