democratic communities
Something extraordinary can happen when we come together to study, think, and talk about urgent problems— attending collectively in a way that changes the very ground of possibility.
Jac • From Text to Tokens
“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free,” Tocqueville wrote, “but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.” To acquire the art of self-government, he believed, citizens have to be together. They have to come out of the isolation of their individualism and experience government at a level local enough that it brings them
... See moreGeorge Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes.
What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit
The resilience to survive difficulty and discord, to brave the vagaries of unmediated human contact, must be maintained through practice. Silicon Valley-bred isolation robs us of that resilience.
What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit
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
“Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another.”
George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
But Lincoln also drew a clear distinction between the unjust real world and the ideal, between the descriptive and the prescriptive. He explained that, while the writers of the Declaration of Independence were not in a position to bestow equality on all people (“they could not confer such a boon”), the founders nevertheless defined “with tolerable
... See moreLaura K. Field • Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right
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
Liberality proposed a different way of relating across disagreement and division. It built toward liberalism’s great insight, what Edmund Fawcett, in his book “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” calls liberalism’s first guiding idea: “Conflict of interests and beliefs was, to the liberal mind, inescapable. If tamed and turned to competition in a... See more