Democracy’s strife on an unlevel playing field
Democracy’s greatest weakness: itself?
There’s an idea circulating among the intelligentsia that democracy carries the seeds of its own destruction. This is more or less the thesis of a book entitled The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion, by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing. These are brilliant, learned gentlemen, and while I haven’t read their book I recommend it based on this in the New York Times which you may have access to, and a three-cornered podcast which you probably do have access to and sheds light on what appears to be the essentials of their thinking about democracy. One of the corollaries of their argument is that democracy can easily slip into autocracy, and this is not a bug but a feature—that is, autocracy itself is not a feature but the potential for slipping into autocracy is. The podcast differentiates between just plain democracy—where you can have a tyranny of the majority—and liberal democracy, where you have minority protections. It’s more complex than that—they say we might see the end of liberal democracy but keep some more generic kind of democracy—but I’ll drop it because I’m more concerned about what’s missing in the discussion.
What’s missing is that when we’re talking about democracy in the United States, we don’t even have a democracy, much less a liberal democracy, to talk about. Don’t have, never did, and by the look of things probably never will, unless . . . (see last section, Voices of Hope below).
The very wise Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, two of the most influential framers of the Constitution, called the American experiment a republic. To resolve the semantics, I like this source, which lands on the side of calling what the U.S. system is, purportedly, a “hybrid democratic republic.” This is the entity that Gershberg and Illing are calling a “liberal democracy.”
But . . .
Any suggestion we did have a liberal democracy (hybrid or not) up to about 2005—before social media began to make a hash out of our political discourse and undermine even our pseudo-democracy —is misleading.