The Paradox of Democracy

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.

a flood of new digital communication platforms inundating free societies with instantaneous information and nonstop networked dialogue.

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.

Yet conflating democracy with good government would be an intellectual and historical mistake. Democracy, from the Athenians to today, has never promised good government. It has only promised—it can only promise—a freedom of deliberation among citizens and their representatives, with rhetoric as the key tool with which to exercise such freedom.

The key question for Lippmann wasn’t whether the average person was intelligent enough to make decisions about public policy; it was whether the average person could ever know enough to choose intelligently.

Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy is another deeply instructive study of the illiberal drift of so many democracies across the globe.3 However, like so many others, Applebaum’s view proceeds from a default assumption that democracy is a discrete system. But that assumption prevents us from understanding democracy as a constantly evolving cultu

For several decades, the American mainstream press endeavored to satisfy the political demand of neutrality, sacrificing even objectivity itself to avoid labels of bias.

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.

Free speech does not guarantee truth or virtue; it simply allows for the confrontation of persuasive communication.