The Paradox of Democracy

there are no epistemological guardrails, no limits to discourse.

We’re now confronting the greatest structural challenge to democracy we’ve ever seen: a truly open society. Without gatekeepers, there are no constraints on discourse. Digital technology has changed everything. Consequently, reality is up for grabs in a way it never has been before.

All democratic communities are held together not by a shared conception of truth but by a commonly recognized experience and a commitment to active dialogue.

A properly liberal state is one in which individual rights are paramount; it protects the individual not only against the abuses of a tyrant but also against the abuses of democratic majorities. Think of liberal democracy as democracy with moral and legal buffers.

For many, persuasion still signals coercion or manipulation, yet the persuasion of rhetoric is the fundamental medium of democracy—a medium that, like all other communication technologies, opens itself to exploitation.

In his 1922 opus, Public Opinion, Lippmann poses a straightforward question: Can citizens achieve a basic knowledge of public affairs and then make reasonable choices about what to do? If the answer is no, then the entire democratic project is at best a folly.

Technologies changed media that changed communicative styles that changed culture that changed thinking and interaction. How we centered ourselves as individuals and the relationships we had to culture, institutions, and the nation-state all transformed.

As John Dewey once observed, communication is not simply the pipe through which water flows. It locates humans squarely in the realm of meanings, and that struggle over meaning is always where democracy can be found.

We’re told about the world before we see it, we imagine things before we experience them, and we become hostages to these preconceptions. These narratives give us an ordered picture of the world, to which our tastes and stereotypes and values are anchored.