democratic communities
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
... See moreZac Gershberg • 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.
Zac Gershberg • The Paradox of Democracy
Our ongoing inability to define communally-shared visions of lives that are ordinary but noble and valuable has left us terribly frustrated with the modern world, and our sclerotic systems convince us that gradual positive change is impossible.
The Rage of the AI Guy
democracies are defined by their cultures of communication. If a democracy consists of citizens deciding, collectively, what ought to be done, then the manner through which they persuade one another determines nearly everything else that follows. And that privileges media ecology as the master political science.
Zac Gershberg • The Paradox of Democracy
Democracy is a system of feelings. Citizens must feel included. When those feelings collapse, no procedural reform can restore legitimacy. Lilliana Mason, in Uncivil Agreement , demonstrates how partisan identity fuses with emotion, producing politics of anger and disdain. Liberals mistake this terrain for irrational noise, but illiberals treat it... See more
https://www.facebook.com/TheBafflerMagazine • The Politics of Humiliation | Richard A. Greenwald
Equality means the right to a life without poverty and its many ills, without discrimination—the opportunity for all people “to realize their full potential and dignity as human beings.”
George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
It was not the lack of democracy that threatened society but the overproduction of direct democracy via the internet that threatened old institutions.
Andrey Mir • The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution
“Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives,” she wrote, “can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense.”
However, in the modern world Arendt argued, common sense “became an inner faculty without any world relationship.” “This sense now was called... See more
However, in the modern world Arendt argued, common sense “became an inner faculty without any world relationship.” “This sense now was called... See more