ON JANUARY 21, 2017, tens of thousands of protesters inched up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and the mood was festive, as men, women, children, grandparents, black, white, brown, all moved toward Trump Tower, a gilded skyscraper near Central Park, and the home of Donald J. Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States, who had assumed office the day before.
The street was a river of “pussyhats,” pink hats with cat ears. They were an allusion to a video recording made public in the final weeks of the presidential campaign the previous fall, revealing that Trump, at the height of his celebrity as the host of the reality-television show The Apprentice, had bragged to a fellow TV host about forcing himself on women: “When you’re a star,” Trump had said, “you can do it. They let you do anything,” adding, “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Despite such revelations of boorish behavior, and despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump had won a clear victory in the Electoral College—the peculiarly American institution created in the Constitution as a compromise between electing the president by a vote in Congress, or electing the president by direct popular vote (in most states, the winner of the popular vote in that state wins all of that state’s electors, who in turn cast votes in the Electoral College).
Trump’s rallies had attracted large crowds of impassioned people. A cartoon of self-reliant cockiness, the candidate adored being the center of attention and, like a louche comedian, merrily defying the norms of civil discourse. He took pleasure in demeaning people publicly and in making the many targets of his scorn seem small, insignificant, and worthy only of contempt. He ballyhooed fabricated claims with impunity, in part because he mocked credentialed experts, and in part because he asserted that most traditional sources of news were flogging fake stories, while he alone was leveling with people. The billionaire who bragged about bribing politicians was ready to blow the whistle on a shadowy world of political fixers: “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
The anti-Trump protest in Manhattan, though inspired by the Women’s March on Washington being held the same day, had quickly exceeded the ability of the original organizers to control it. Fifth Avenue crackled with energy, almost giddiness, as participants took turns brandishing their handmade posters to the cheers of participants: “Fuck the Electoral College.” “I can’t believe we’re still protesting this.” “Pussy Power.” “Equality Includes Every ‘1.’” “Our voices together can’t be silenced.”
Every few minutes, a chant would rise and fall:
“We are the popular vote!”
“Not my president!”
I joined in the shouting, joyful at the crowd surrounding me—more than four hundred thousand people in all, according to the mayor’s office, making it one of the largest public demonstrations in New York City’s history. (The largest was perhaps the anti-nuclear march in Central Park held on June 12, 1982, which attracted more than one million people.)
“What does democracy look like?” someone shouted every few minutes. And every few minutes, the crowd roared back:
“This is what democracy looks like!”
* * *
OUR CALL-AND-RESPONSE implied that we were the real democrats—not them.
But that was a facile assumption. The same claim—“This is what democracy looks like”—could just as well apply to the complex electoral process that had produced a Trump presidency. And it certainly applied to the broader political movement he inspired, which invited angry white voters to decide for themselves, “Who was sovereign? The people, or money?”
Hence the pathos of the Manhattan anti-Trump protest: for who, after all, were we?
I had felt proud of Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. It wasn’t because I agreed with all of his policies—I didn’t—but in part, it was because he had made history as our first black president, and I longed for America to become an ever more inclusive country. It was also because Obama was a trained professional, a lawyer, a professor, an intellectual, and a writer. And not only that, he lived near the University of Chicago campus, where I had attended the lab school that John Dewey had founded. In other words, Obama was closer than any other president in my lifetime to being a member of my tribe.
The election of Trump shocked me. I was in Norway at the time, where I was to deliver a talk on the function of cultural criticism in a democratic society. As soon as the results were clear, and still shaken by the implications, I sent a somewhat overwrought email the next morning to my three sons:
The sun is shining in Norway as another day begins in Europe, the site of the world’s most recent auto-da-fé. And I am reminded of the epigraph, by William Morris, which I included at the front of the book I dedicated to my three sons, “Democracy Is in the Streets”: “Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.” Dearly beloved, I am sorry that I and my generation of compatriots have failed you, and your children, as our country reaps the whirlwind. It is you, and they, who will have to make it right, if right it can be made. But you know, and you care, about what is right, and in that I find some measure of comfort in this dark time.
“That’s not who we are,” Obama liked to say as president, in an effort, I assume, to appeal to our better angels as Americans. He wanted to gesture toward the idea that America is a nation of immigrants and a model of liberal democratic values, like tolerance, civil rights for minorities, and civil liberties for all. All these things seemed to me good, and deeply in the American grain.
Trump, in stark contrast, highlighted other aspects of democracy in America: the appeal of a demagogue who mirrors the simplest impulses of the meanest among us; a certain racially inflected nativism; an animus against trained experts who can be intimidating and bureaucrats who can be bossy; and a fascination with celebrities who, to an exaggerated degree, seem to enjoy some version of the so-called American Dream.
By 2016, we Americans were more polarized than ever. And the nation’s complex form of indirect electoral democracy always had the potential to thwart majorities, in addition to producing results that would inevitably leave large groups of people in a bitterly divided country feeling like strangers in their own land.
Obama’s election had obviously made a large number of Americans feel that way in 2008 and 2012. Now it was my turn.
* * *
“IN THE UNITED STATES,” the American political scholar Samuel P. Huntington remarked, what seems like a broad “ideological consensus”—for example, over the values of democracy and self-reliant individualism, and the providential arc of an American history that bends toward justice—“is the source of political conflict.” In America, he observed, “polarization occurs over moral issues rather than economic ones.” The land suffers “moral convulsions” because the pursuit of widely shared ideals—including democracy itself—inevitably leads to the recurrent recognition that these ideals are both understood differently by different groups of citizens and, often, being honored in the breach: “The image of the triumphant realization of the American promise or ideal was an exercise in patriotic unreality at best and hypocrisy at worst. The history of American politics is the repetition of new beginnings and flawed outcomes, promise and disillusion, reform and reaction.”
These now seem to me sensible observations—but Huntington’s work, when I first read it, angered me. I bristled at his hostility to the New Left and his skepticism about the value of participatory democracy. I can see from my tattered and marked-up copy of his contribution to the 1975 study The Crisis of Democracy that I was primed as a young professor of politics, just starting to teach at the University of Texas in Austin, to be outraged by his barbed quips, for example: “What the Marxists mistakenly attribute to capitalist economics”—constant conflict—“is, in fact, a product of democratic politics.”
Huntington’s thesis was deceptively simple: the very “vigor” of democracy in the United States in the 1960s had contributed to “a democratic distemper,” involving an unstable combination of growing popular demands for more government services, on the one hand, and a growing popular distrust of governmental authority, on the other. What ailed the country was an excess of democracy. America needed a new “balance,” in which citizens would remember that in many situations “expertise, seniority, experience, and special talents may override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority.”
Perhaps, Huntington implied, John Adams had been right to warn, almost two hundred years ago (roughly the life span of the Athenian democracy), that “there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Such worries, which seemed absurd to me as a young man, seemed eerily apt as I was writing this book—and discovering that my own views had grown closer to Huntington’s than I imagined possible.
* * *
A QUINTESSENTIAL PRODUCT of America’s liberal aspirations and meritocratic institutions in the relatively prosperous and progressive milieu he was raised within, Samuel Huntington came of age during the height of what some, during and after World War II, began boastfully to call “the American Century.” He descended from old Yankee stock, his forebears having arrived in 1633, not long after the Mayflower had brought the first Puritan refugees to New England. He grew up among wordsmiths: his mother was a writer, his father was an editor, and his maternal grandfather had been a publisher who championed the progressive views of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
A prodigy, the young Huntington tested into New York’s elite Stuyvesant High School, left early to attend Yale College, and graduated early again, at the age of eighteen; in 1950, after a stint in the army, he became a full-time teacher at Harvard. He was twenty-three years old.
Modest in demeanor and mild-mannered by temperament, he belonged to the uppermost stratum of American scholarly and intellectual life, joining the small number of bright young men (in those days it was only men) clustered in Cambridge, New Haven, New York, Princeton, Chicago, and Palo Alto, on call to offer policy advice or join the administration of the U.S. government. He was just the kind of learned expert that Woodrow Wilson, and Walter Lippmann after him, had hoped would help steer American society on a steady course toward the realization of its guiding liberal democratic principles.
But he was fated to live in interesting times.
By 1947, a global cold war had begun after both Winston Churchill and Harry Truman warned that the world was now divided into two rival camps by an “iron curtain,” imposed on Europe by Joseph Stalin, premier of the Soviet Union and also, more importantly, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (dictators for life must wear many hats).
As a result of this epochal showdown, liberal representative democracies on the western side of a militarized zone confronted soviet-style “democratic centralist” regimes on the eastern side.
Each of these self-styled “superpowers” claimed to be more authentically democratic—more representative of the wishes of their sovereign people—than the other.
Of course, these claims were breathtakingly misleading. The leaders of the rival nations had assiduously perfected strong central states defined not by transparency and broad popular political participation but rather by “hierarchy, coercion, secrecy and deception” (in Huntington’s words, describing the American side of this Faustian pact). Even more alarming, their existential struggle, however muted for public consumption, made sensitive observers worry about the fate of the earth. An arms race consumed the rival peoples’ resources. Both sides stockpiled a growing number of ever more sophisticated nuclear weapons. Both sides maneuvered for advantage, in part through proxy wars that engulfed distant lands in death and destruction, and in part through hair-raising episodes of “nuclear brinksmanship.” The most memorable example of the latter came during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when, as declassified documents show, Soviet and American leaders came dangerously close to irradiating a large portion of the Northern Hemisphere.
Meanwhile, a series of newly independent nations appeared, claiming their right to self-determination, starting with the partitioning of British India into the new nations of the Republic of India and the Dominion of Pakistan in 1947. The Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea followed in 1948, the former located in the southern part of the Korean peninsula, the latter in the north. The Lao People’s Democratic Republic was declared after Laos obtained its freedom from France in 1949. The Netherlands granted independence to Indonesia the same year. The United Kingdom of Libya was formed in 1950. The following year the United States established a formal association with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico that stopped short of offering the former protectorate full rights of self-determination.
And so it went through the 1950s, with perhaps the most bitter proxy war and struggle for independence erupting in Vietnam. This was a thirty-year war that started in 1946 with a revolt against the nation’s French colonial masters, and then evolved after 1954, when the French withdrew, into a civil war, with the United States supporting an autocratic “Republic of Vietnam” against a communist “Democratic Republic of Vietnam” in a losing battle that ended only in 1975, with the fall of Saigon.
Samuel Huntington devoted a lifetime to understanding these epochal developments, and to analyzing the institutions, national identities, and political ideals that lay behind them. A lifelong supporter of America’s Democratic Party—he wrote speeches for its candidate Adlai Stevenson in his losing 1956 presidential campaign against the Republican World War II hero Dwight D. Eisenhower—he became obsessed with how best to maintain political order in a world where political conflict was chronic, and potentially catastrophic. An Episcopalian, he admired the midcentury Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who thought wicked men could not survive without strong institutional restraints—Niebuhr famously declared that “man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” (It is worth noting that Niebuhr’s 1944 maxim makes no sense unless “democracy” means the kind of representative regime directing a strong central state that President Franklin D. Roosevelt presided over in America’s war against Hitler’s Germany and the Empire of Japan.)
After the war, Huntington’s curiosity was piqued by President Harry Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination at the height of the Korean War. What, he wondered, should be the proper relation of The Soldier and the State, to borrow the title of his first book, published in 1957. His central thesis was that only a professionally trained officer corps, given autonomous command of a large standing army, could assure both national security and civilian control, offering as one model the nineteenth-century German army, which was composed of “average men succeeding by superior education, organization and experience.” He praised West Point as “a bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon”—and that zinger was enough to convince his Harvard colleagues to deny him tenure that year, on the grounds that he was infatuated with Prussian-style militarism. (He would return to Harvard after only five years in the wilderness, teaching at Columbia.)
In 1968, several years after completing a comparative study of the United States and the Soviet Union with his friend Zbigniew Brzezinski, Huntington published his next significant book, Political Order in Changing Societies, analyzing the global scene. In this context, Huntington admonished American policy makers to temper their characteristic “hopeful air of unreality” when it came to foreign affairs. He warned that it was counterproductive for American policy makers to assume that newly independent peoples, freed from the domination of their Westernizing masters, would rush to embrace the liberal democratic institutions that most postwar theorists of “modernization,” like Woodrow Wilson before them, had naïvely assumed were the logical goal of global historical development.
By then, Huntington had joined the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. At the president’s behest, he chaired the Vietnam subcommittee of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group from 1966 to 1969—its very existence suggested the global reach of American power in this period. In an infamous essay published in 1968 in Foreign Affairs, Huntington publicly expressed optimism that the Orwellian American policy of “forced-draft urbanization”—dragooning South Vietnamese peasants into relocating to adjacent urban areas with a garrison—might succeed in shoring up resistance to communist forces. Yet as declassified documents subsequently revealed, Huntington behind closed doors was arguing the opposite, trying to convince Johnson and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, that the administration’s military strategy in Vietnam was doomed to failure.
His public comments turned Huntington into a villain in the eyes of antiwar protesters like myself, and our judgment was mainly moral: his apparent support for the Vietnam War was not merely misguided, or ill-judged, it was wicked. But in retrospect Huntington is perhaps better seen not as the embodiment of pure evil, as some of us too hastily concluded, but rather as something subtler, and perhaps more insidious: the ideal type of the modern-day liberal technocrat—the tough-minded expert insider who is willing to speak truth to power but who is loyal to a fault and therefore speaks truth only in secret, while behaving obsequiously in public.
When Hubert Humphrey, in his losing campaign to become president in 1968, belatedly delivered a speech announcing that if elected president he would pursue a political, not a purely military, solution to the war in Vietnam, it was Huntington who wrote it. But it was too little, too late. Humphrey lost, Richard Nixon became president, and Huntington left Washington with dirty hands and a signal failure to play a winning inside game.
Reviled by outspoken student radicals, Huntington became the target of personal attacks after his return to Harvard. His young son awoke one day to find “War Criminal Lives Here” painted on the front door of his family’s Cambridge home. Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, where Huntington worked, was firebombed. In the eyes of critics like Noam Chomsky, he was one of the “new mandarins of American power.”
Yet Huntington, despite the violence in the air, was imperturbable; if anything, he seemed to relish the attention. He grew ever more fearless in his willingness to broach provocative ideas in print, expressing the conservative core of his liberal democratic views with aphoristic force: “Men may have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty without order. Authority has to exist before it can be limited.” He frankly feared anarchy more than he feared domination: “‘Who governs?’ is obviously one of the most important questions to ask concerning any political system,” he remarked. “Even more important, however, may be the question, ‘Does anybody govern?’” (For the many peoples around the world in the last century who have had to endure massacres and famines in failed states, these are not academic questions.)
Although Huntington briefly worked for Brzezinski when his old friend became national security adviser for the Democratic president Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, he mainly focused his energies on teaching undergraduates at Harvard—and on episodically commenting in books and articles on the main currents of history as he perceived them.
When the Soviet Union unexpectedly collapsed in 1989, and a renewed democratic spirit afterward led to mainly peaceful transitions to liberal democratic regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, Huntington saw no cause to celebrate. Where his student Francis Fukuyama perceived the apparent triumph of liberal democracy as the logical climax of world history, Huntington discerned the ascendance of new centers of political power in China and the Islamic world, both representing mature civilizations of great antiquity—and both offering religious and authoritarian alternatives to Western liberal ideals of human rights and representative democracy. “A multicultural world is unavoidable because global empire is impossible,” Huntington concluded. “In a multicivilizational world, the constructive course is to renounce universalism, accept diversity, and seek commonalities.”
Huntington’s position was nuanced—but his book’s title characteristically was not. As a result, The Clash of Civilizations provoked furious opposition when it was first published as an essay in Foreign Affairs in 1993, and then as a book in 1996.
Several years later, after the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, had inaugurated what, as I write, seems to be an unending and unwinnable American “War on Terrorism,” I found myself debating Huntington’s thesis at a three-day conference billed as Jihad, McWorld, Modernity: Public Intellectuals Debate “The Clash of Civilizations.” The keynote speaker, the political theorist Benjamin Barber, a well-known advocate of “strong democracy,” tore into our topic with gusto. Professor Huntington was a “hyperbolic commentator” whose views were “redolent of 18th-century imperialism,” Barber thundered, before going on to blame American popular culture for offending Muslims by beaming vulgar music videos around the world instead of promoting the poetry of Walt Whitman. The title of Huntington’s book had become a sound bite, and Barber, like most of us that weekend, missed Huntington’s point entirely.
A similar fate awaited Huntington’s final book, Who Are We? published in 2004, about “the challenges to America’s National Identity,” as the subtitle put it. This time Huntington analyzed what he took to be the long-term implications of demographic and cultural trends on America’s sense of national identity. Once again, critics were infuriated, this time by the matter-of-fact way Huntington described the influx of undocumented immigrants and the rapid growth of the country’s Spanish-speaking population as dangerously weakening the traditional hold of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men on the levers of political power.
“One very plausible reaction” to such an erosion of power, he warned with chilling accuracy,
would be the emergence of exclusivist sociopolitical movements composed largely but not only of white males, protesting and attempting to stop or reverse these changes and what they believe, accurately or not, to be the diminution of their social and economic status, their loss of jobs to immigrants and foreign countries, the perversion of their culture, the displacement of their language, and the erosion or even evaporation of the historical identity of their country. Such movements would be both racially and culturally inspired and could be anti-Hispanic, anti-black, and anti-immigration. They would be the heir to the many comparable exclusivist racial and antiforeign movements that helped define American identity in the past—social movements, political groups, intellectual currents, dissidents of various sorts who share these characteristics in many ways but still have enough in common to be brought together under the label “white nativism.”
Huntington highlighted four main components of American identity in this final work. The first and most important, he suggested, was racial, as America for more than two centuries had defined itself in terms of white supremacy, “which involved the enslavement, subordination, and segregation of blacks, the massacre of Indians, and the exclusion of Asians.” Ethnicity as a criterion of American identity had been subsequently mobilized by Anglophile elites after 1924 to marginalize immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, most of them Catholic or Jewish. A third and ever more salient factor in the dominant shared culture became a deep sense of religiosity (“In God We Trust”), primarily associated with Anglo-Protestant forms of Christian worship.
The final key aspect of American identity, according to Huntington, was “an ideology (the ‘American Creed’) articulated in the Declaration of Independence,” and a handful of other documents that had enunciated shared political principles.
As Huntington well knew, America’s democratic ideology was egalitarian and inclusive in principle. But he had previously shown that it also generated chronic conflict, as liberalizing reforms produced, in turn, furious political resistance (as had happened, for example, with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which was followed by a striking resurgence of racially inflected conservative political movements in the decades that followed).
Hence the pointed question Huntington posed in his final book: “Can a people remain a people if all that holds them together is a set of political principles?” He answered, “Perhaps. But the historical evidence is not encouraging as was underlined by the collapse of the other contemporary superpower whose identity was solely defined by its ideology.”
If the Soviet version of democratic idealism had proved impotent under duress and collapsed, to be replaced by a renascent, religiously inflected form of Russian nationalism, why should Americans assume that their version of democratic idealism would prove any more resilient, if put to the test by white nativism?
For Samuel P. Huntington at the end of his life, this is what American democracy looked like: a fragile ideology, with cloudy prospects.
* * *
“THIS IS WHAT democracy looks like!”—for some of us protesting Trump in New York on January 21, 2017, this was a familiar chant. We’d heard it before, earlier in the decade, during the Occupy Wall Street movement. That movement had been inspired, in part, by the staggering growth of inequality in the United States and around the world, as a result of the partial dismantling of social insurance policies that, earlier in the twentieth century, had been the chief egalitarian achievement of labor, liberal, and social democratic political parties worldwide.
Occupy Wall Street was inspired as well by the wave of democratic uprisings that had begun in January 2011 in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, among other Arab countries, before spreading to Russia, Spain, and Greece. Samuel Huntington had identified “three waves” of global democratization: the first occurring in the United States and Europe from 1776 to 1945; the second occurring around the world as a result of decolonization after World War II; and the third occurring after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and sweeping through Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Since then, other scholars have suggested a “fourth wave,” this one including much of sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab World, and cresting in 2011.
The Occupy movement was prompted, in part, by the impressive speed with which Arab activists had harnessed social media to mobilize large masses of protesters, as if to prove (as one Internet guru boasted) “the power of organizing without organization”—an anarchist’s dream come true. At the same time, Occupy was modeled more closely on the direct-democratic public assemblies of protesters favored that year by the Indignados—the Outraged—a Spanish anti-austerity movement that occupied Puerta del Sol square in Madrid in May 2011.
Hoping to produce a similar upwelling of democratic discontent in America, a group of self-selected activists, about sixty in all, met on the afternoon of August 2, 2011, at Bowling Green, a park in downtown Manhattan with the famous bronze statue of a charging bull, installed in 1989 as a tribute to the financial power of nearby Wall Street.
The people had gathered by the bull in response to a call for a general assembly that would organize an occupation of Wall Street. The idea, which originated with Adbusters, an anti-advertising Canadian print magazine (run, naturally, by veterans of the advertising industry), was popularized on social media by the hacker collective Anonymous, whose followers fetishized the wearing of Guy Fawkes masks as shown in the graphic novel and film V for Vendetta. In the event, only a few dozen seasoned activists showed up, from a variety of political backgrounds. Some were students, others were union organizers. There were socialists, but a surprising number were libertarians committed to “leaderless resistance” and also allied with Ron Paul, who had been a maverick Republican candidate for president in 2008.
But still more were partisans of direct-democratic public assemblies, who in some cases considered themselves anarchists. Expecting an open assembly, the radical democrats and anarchists had found instead a few people with megaphones and prefab placards, trying to rally participants for a conventional march that would make conventional demands. In response, the radical democrats, led by an anthropology professor and avowed anarchist named David Graeber, retreated to a corner of the park to discuss alternative steps.
Sitting in a circle, they debated how they might better organize a Wall Street occupation. They agreed that they would take seriously the online call to create a general assembly—and proposed implementing one of the most radical forms of direct democracy conceivable: a daily meeting, open to all, where virtually all decisions would be made without voting, by consensus, and formally subject to veto by a single “block,” if anyone felt a proposed decision violated an ethical principle.
It all seemed hopelessly idealistic. But the direct democrats prevailed. And against all odds, the movement they helped to launch briefly changed the political conversation in America. Occupy Wall Street compelled the media to pay fresh attention to voices on the left. It focused fresh attention on the dramatic rise in economic inequality in the United States and around the world. And despite a deliberate lack of explicit demands, it “reignited hope in the possibility of a free society,” in part by exemplifying, in the words of one participant, a new world that was “participatory and democratic to the core.”
In this way, Occupy Wall Street resurrected a recurring feature of the international left since the 1960s: an overriding commitment to participatory democracy, understood as the making of decisions in a face-to-face community of friends and not through elected representatives.
I myself had once advocated a similar form of democracy, as an activist in Students for a Democratic Society in the late 1960s, inspired by the vision of “participatory democracy” on offer in the organization’s founding manifesto, “The Port Huron Statement.” But my own experiments in radical democracy quickly fell apart, as my friends and I tired of the endless meetings and suppressed disagreements that the quest for consensus entailed. As I wrote in my 1987 book, “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, perhaps the most important result of the SDS experience was to demonstrate “the incompatibility of rule by consensus with accountable, responsible government in a large organization—or even in a small group of people with divergent interests and a limited patience for endless meetings.”
In fact, the young people who drafted “The Port Huron Statement” in 1962 had never meant to propose rule-by-consensus as a working definition of participatory democracy—this was an understanding that evolved later in the decade and was fiercely contested at the time, notably by pragmatic veterans of the Port Huron conference. Yet even this modest lesson about the limits of rule-by-consensus has proved hard to learn, perhaps because, as I also wrote, “for anyone who joined in the search for a democracy of individual participation—and certainly for anyone who remembers the happiness and holds to the hopes that the quest itself aroused—the sense of what politics can mean will never be quite the same again.”
The result, for many subsequent groups on the global left, has been an unstable political idealism, an amalgam of direct action and direct democracy, with many of the virtues of a utopian and romantic revolt—passion, moral conviction, a shared joy in the joining of battle—but also some of the vices: above all, an obsession with directly democratic processes and an addiction to creating ever more intense situations of felt personal liberation, regardless of the wider political ramifications.
Avowedly anti-authoritarian, nonhierarchical, and leaderless, Occupy assemblies cropped up in cities across the United States. Most of them adhered to rule-by-consensus as an end in itself and as the best way to show that direct democracy really is workable. The assemblies were a free association of self-selected participants. In principle, anyone might join and participate, just as anyone might exit at any time. The assemblies thus enshrined, in a radical form, the principle that “every person is free to do as they wish.”
While the freedom of the individual was in principle inviolable in the assemblies, another goal was to forge, through consensus, a new form of collective freedom. Naturally, the assemblies could not hope to realize this goal without some help. Since leaders were not formally acknowledged, help took the form of so-called facilitators, individuals trained to foster what one guide to the process called “Collective Thinking”:
When faced with a decision, the normal response of two people with differing opinions tends to be confrontational. They each defend their opinions with the aim of convincing their opponent, until their opinion has won or, at most, a compromise has been reached. The aim of Collective Thinking, on the other hand, is to construct. That is to say, two people with differing ideas work together to build something new. The onus is therefore not on my idea or yours; rather it is the notion that two ideas together will produce something new, something that neither of us had envisaged beforehand. This focus requires of us that we actively listen.
If a single person blocks consensus, the group must listen even more carefully and seek to find common ground in a way that might win over the individual with objections; “Prejudice and ideology must be left at home.” Another goal was to forge a “new subjectivity,” expressed in a new form of political speech.
The joy of collectively creating a new political space was palpable in the earliest firsthand accounts of those who occupied Zuccotti Park on September 17: “If you want to see what real democracy, run horizontally, with full participation, looks like, you should be here,” wrote one Occupier the next day. Here was a real, and striking, alternative to simply pulling levers to choose between candidates selected in advance by others, and often selected precisely in order to defend the interests of an oligarchic elite. “There is an energy and an amazing consensus process working with 50+ people in general assembly several times a day,” wrote another participant a few days later, marveling at how the group was successfully “making decisions about how to run the occupation—from when to do marches, to how to communicate, to ideas about food, art, entertainment, and all kinds of issues that anyone can bring up.”
The first surge of enthusiasm gradually waned. As time passed and the Occupiers dug in, the general assembly in New York became bogged down in logistical details. A great deal of time and energy was devoted to making sure the Occupiers had sleeping bags and food and were able to clear garbage from the site. Meetings often lasted for hours. To keep the assembly moving, the facilitators became ever more forceful in setting an agenda and limiting the scope of debate. Sometimes the group resorted to a form of “modified consensus,” which instead of unanimity required a supermajority of at least two-thirds. Even then, anyone had a right to veto a proposal if he or she felt it violated some fundamental principle that might cause him or her to quit the group.
Effective decision making on many matters, both logistical and political, simultaneously devolved to a number of decentralized “working groups” that met separately and fell under the effective control of various individuals who assumed de facto power within the movement. (As one of the leaderless group’s leaders confided, “Consensus only works if working groups or collectives don’t feel they need to seek constant approval from the larger group, if initiative arises from below.”) The groups working on direct action and confrontations with the police naturally put a premium on solidarity and discretion, not an open airing of doubts and disagreements.
This process of political experimentation slowly ground to a halt, as small groups of neo-anarchists, most notably in New York City, inspired by the militancy of Occupy Oakland, kept searching for confrontational “experiences of visionary inspiration”—at the time, it seemed as if the painstaking task of creating a sustainable movement had proved too painful, and boringly pragmatic, for many followers who had been inspired by Occupy Wall Street in its early months. Even worse, the police departments in cities like New York proved adept—thanks in part to the vulnerability of social media to government surveillance—at infiltrating various groups working on direct action, and arresting activists before they could act.
In the early hours of November 15, 2011, the New York Police Department had little trouble clearing Zuccotti Park of its tents and occupants. Although protesters were allowed back into the park without camping equipment, the downtown occupation had lost precious momentum.
Over the winter, activists tried to regroup and to plan another big citywide protest. But a planned May Day blockade of New York City’s bridges and tunnels failed to materialize—and after a brief, last hurrah in September 2012, New York City’s experiment in rule-by-consensus was effectively finished—the latest in a long line of failures on the international left to elaborate new forms of horizontal self-governance that can transcend the consensus model and solve some of the manifold problems of democracy in a complex modern society.
* * *
THE FIRST and perhaps most obvious problem is scale. It is one thing to create a participatory community of five hundred or a thousand—or even a democracy of forty thousand direct participants, as the Athenians did in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. It is quite another thing to imagine direct, participatory interaction in large and complex societies on the scale of the United States. Perhaps one can envision a federation of nested assemblies, along the lines proposed by Condorcet in 1793 or G.D.H. Cole in his Guild Socialist essays, but any serious effort to implement such a structure will require a delegation of authority and the selection of representatives—in short, the creation of an indirect democracy, and at some distance from most participants.
Even more challenging is the fact that many of the protesters’ concerns—for example, systemic debt, structural unemployment, the unfettered power of finance capital, global warming—involve dilemmas that can be addressed best by new forms of global and transnational regulation and governance, not by local assemblies.
Equally insidious are the paradoxical results that occur in a polarizing protest movement that simultaneously demands consensus in its organs of self-government. As a result of the willingness of moderates within such a movement to compromise, the consensus view that prevails is generally the most radical alternative on offer (as had happened before in SDS in the late 1960s—yet another illustration of what Cass Sunstein has called “the law of group polarization”).
Some of these problems could be papered over briefly. Occupy proved that a handful of networked activists can exploit social media to muster a large, ostensibly leaderless protest movement. But when the tear gas and crowds have dispersed from the city squares, those left behind will have to face the fact that “organizing without organizations” is a fantasy—not a winning long-term political strategy.
In any case, the very conditions of the Occupy general assembly’s existence—it was, after all, a free association of self-selected participants—meant that these experiments in participatory democracy never had to confront seriously the toughest challenge to social democratic ideals in a complex and large modern society. That challenge is coping with participants with incommensurable beliefs and convictions, including radically different views on whether or not social justice requires less income inequality, never mind the abolition of capitalism.
One glance at the world we actually live in should suffice to remind us of the many other things people do not share: notably moral values and religious faith, but also a passion for political participation. As Hannah Arendt remarked—and this is in fact a crucial point—one of “the most important negative liberties we have enjoyed since the end of the ancient world” is “freedom from politics, which was unknown to Rome or Athens and which is politically the most relevant part of our Christian heritage.”
The larger a group, the more ineradicable such diversity will be, unless the group is willing to resort to coercion, in an effort to force unity and guarantee political participation (as has happened routinely in a great many avowedly democratic and socialist organizations and states over the years).
In other words, I seriously doubt that experiments in rule-by-consensus, like those I experienced in the 1960s, or the Occupy movement in 2011, will ever generate the kinds of alternative institutions that are needed to meet the challenges of our current situation.
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INSTEAD OF SINGLE-MINDEDLY PURSUING a new form of “collective thinking” through endless meetings meant to forge consensus—a quixotic and self-destructive goal that led astray the sans-culottes in 1793, the soviets in 1905 and 1917, and the New Left of the 1960s— we would do better to explore new ways to foster a tolerant ethos that accepts, and can acknowledge, that there are many incompatible forms of life and forms of politics, not always directly democratic or participatory, in which humans can flourish. This, in part, is what I understand by the aspiration to create a liberal democracy.
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IN 2017, CONDOLEEZZA RICE, the secretary of state under George W. Bush and a professed champion of liberal democracy, published a book with a title that seemed eerily irrelevant in the early months of Donald J. Trump’s presidency—Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom. The daughter of an African American educator, she had grown up in Alabama at a time when that state was still segregated. After college, she did graduate work in political science, becoming an expert in Soviet politics and international relations. In 1981, she joined the faculty of Stanford University, subsequently serving in the National Security Council under President George H. W. Bush, where she had her first real experience in government as part of the foreign policy team that oversaw the start of democratic transitions in Eastern and Central European countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
She was, in other words, like Samuel Huntington before her, just the kind of liberal technocrat that the direct democrats in Occupy Wall Street regarded as complicit in ongoing American war crimes.
The cover of Rice’s book features a famous black-and-white photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr., at the head of a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965—a high point of the American civil rights movement, which Rice covers in the first chapter of her book. Subsequent chapters focus on Russia and the rise of democracy in Poland, recounting how the United States under George H. W. Bush tried to foster a “new world order,” based on the peaceful global spread of liberal democracy and capitalism. Drawing on her own experience in the 2000s, Rice also details the more daunting democratic challenges faced in Kenya, Colombia, Iraq, and Egypt in that decade.
Rice apparently harbors few of the qualms about modern democracy’s universal appeal that haunted Huntington’s thinking. On the contrary, she is unabashed in her conviction that the United States is exceptional in the universal obligation it bears to support the democratic aspirations of all peoples—in some cases, such as Iraq, through the use of armed force.
Rice’s own career as national security adviser and secretary of state to George W. Bush highlights the ease with which a principled goal—for example, the reconstruction, under American supervision, of Iraq in 2005 as a “democratic, federal, representative republic”—may also trigger depraved conduct (such as torturing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, a crime acknowledged but played down in Rice’s terse account). One is reminded of the murderous consequences of other modern efforts to institute democratic ideals. But I also found myself struck by the contrast with Trump, who seemed in 2017 to stand for nothing at all, apart from reaping the rewards of office and representing the collective egoism of America.
Rice offers only an implicit definition of liberal democracy, by referring to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: its components must include the right to life, liberty, and security of person; freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; freedom of opinion and expression; freedom of peaceful assembly and association; and the right to take part in government, directly or through freely chosen representatives. And with this implicit definition in mind—and in a context of arguing for the universal relevance of American liberal democratic values—she reaches an optimistic conclusion: “If democracy is broadly understood to mean the right to speak your mind, to be free from the arbitrary power of the state, and to insist that those who would govern you must ask for your consent, then democracy—the only form of government that guarantees these freedoms—has never been more widely accepted as right.”
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OTHER SOCIAL SCIENTISTS are more skeptical. Some have even decried a “democratic recession,” others, a “democratic disconnect.” But of course everything hinges on precisely how we decide to define modern democracy, and especially liberal democracy, and chart its vicissitudes over time.
In 1970, Robert Dahl, his generation’s greatest American scholar of democracy as a form of government, proposed that a political regime must meet eight institutional requirements to be considered a democracy: (1) almost all adult citizens have the right to vote; (2) almost all adult citizens are eligible to hold office; (3) political leaders have the right to compete for votes; (4) elections are free and fair; (5) all citizens may form and join political parties and other kinds of political associations; (6) all citizens can freely express their political opinions; (7) diverse sources of information about politics and public policies exist and are legally protected; and (8) government policies depend on votes, or other expressions of public opinion.
This is a fairly minimal definition of democracy—yet it’s not clear that the United States in the 2010s met even these basic requirements. For example, the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels in 2016 marshaled a great deal of empirical evidence to show that in the United States elections demonstrably do not produce a responsive government. Instead, individuals sort themselves into segmented groups, choose political parties based on tribal attachments, and then adjust their views of public affairs, and even their perception of reality, to match these attachments; as a result, elections generally turn on voters holding views that are “thin, disorganized, and ideologically incoherent,” leaving the country “badly governed by incompetent and untrustworthy politicians beholden to special interests,” rather than to the voters they ostensibly represent.
At the same time, voter suppression (via the circulation of negative propaganda, among other tools) is a standard tactic in modern American elections, and many states make it difficult, not easy, to cast a vote. And while it is true de jure that all adult citizens in America are eligible to hold public office, de facto only a minority of more or less affluent citizens can afford to run for political offices. There is also a convincing body of empirical research—by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, as well as Bartels—suggesting that in America, at least, poorer citizens have almost zero impact on public policy.
In recent years, several organizations devoted to liberal values have tried to define modern democracy more rigorously, in order to produce annual statistics indicating whether it is in retreat—or expanding. For many years, the best-known such index was that produced by Freedom House, an American government-funded nonprofit organization dedicated (in its own words) “to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world.” Ever since the late 1970s, it has graded countries on a scale from 1 to 7, measuring ten indicators of political freedom and fifteen indicators of civil liberties, and then sorting 195 countries into three categories: free, partly free, not free. Its annual report for 2018, titled “Democracy in Crisis,” found that a total of seventy-one countries had suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties, compared with only thirty-five that registered gains: “This marked the 12th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.”
Since 2006, the British newsweekly The Economist, through its Intelligence Unit, has compiled a more fine-grained Democracy Index, and since 2010 the index has been compiled annually. In addition to the political and civil liberties measured by Freedom House, The Economist measures the functioning of government, to determine if democratically reached decisions are implemented; the democratic health of the political culture, with apathy and quiescent citizens seen as inconsistent with democracy; and the extent of active, freely chosen participation of citizens in public life, not only through voting but also by joining political parties and taking part in public debates and protests. Based on a scoring of these various indicators, each country is then classified as one of four types of regime: a full democracy; a flawed democracy; an authoritarian regime; or a “hybrid regime,” combining authoritarian and democratic features. In its 2017 Democracy Index, The Economist concluded that 49.3 percent of the world’s population resides in some sort of democracy, though only 4.5 percent live in a “full democracy.” The report also finds that in 2017
the average global score fell from 5.52 in 2016 to 5.48 (on a scale of 0 to 10). Some 89 countries experienced a decline in their total score compared with 2016, more than three times as many as the countries that recorded an improvement (27), the worst performance since 2010–11 in the aftermath of the global economic and financial crisis. The other 51 countries stagnated, as their scores remained unchanged compared with 2016.
It is noteworthy that The Economist, like Freedom House, does not measure levels of social and economic well-being. However, the United Nations does cover these areas in its Human Development Index (which measures good health, access to knowledge, human rights, human security, standard of living, absence of discrimination, dignity, and the extent of political self-determination). Social democrats have long argued that there are social and economic preconditions for fully developing the individual and the collective capacities for self-government—the UN Human Development Index is meant to track progress in fostering these capacities.
Though all three of these indexes are rough instruments (and some scholars dispute their results), their measures, despite some discrepancies in their findings, produce roughly similar conclusions. These conclusions have now been confirmed by a fourth, much more comprehensive new annual report, first issued in 2017 by a joint Swedish-American research venture, the V-Dem Institute. The institute compiled an uncommonly large and detailed data set that covers 177 countries, a staggering 117 years, and more than 350 indicators, as well as 52 indexes measuring various aspects of democracy.
The V-Dem report, interpreting its data within a much longer time frame than the other surveys, concludes that “the average levels of democracy in the world are still close to their highest ever recorded level even if a slight (statistically insignificant) decline may be detectable over the last few years.”
The countries with the most freedoms, and the most fully realized democracies, are in general also prosperous, with developed market economies. They also generally score highest on the UN Human Development Index, led by the Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Denmark), followed by Canada, Australia, and various Northern European countries (Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Ireland). High-ranking Asian nations include Japan and South Korea. Of the Latin American nations, Uruguay ranks high, along with Chile. Africa lags behind the rest of the world. China ranks much higher on the Human Development Index than on the freedom or democracy indexes.
And the United States, which ranks “very high” on human development, and is considered “free” by Freedom House, in 2016 was ranked twenty-first in The Economist index, tied with Italy, making it a “flawed democracy” for the first time in the history of the index.
The chief reason for this demotion was not the election of Donald Trump. It was the extremely low level of popular trust in government, elected officials, and political parties in the United States. Indeed, Trump tapped into this popular disaffection with politics and won office in part by mobilizing normally quiescent citizens, arguably increasing, not diminishing popular political participation, at least in the course of his campaign to win office.
In other words, the rise of Trump, like the ensuing popular resistance to the legitimacy of his presidency, is, I think, best understood not as a protest against democracy per se but rather as a protest against the limits of modern democracy. The British referendum on leaving the European Union in 2016 similarly mobilized large numbers of previously apathetic citizens to vote. Both elections expressed a desire, however inchoate and potentially self-defeating, for more democracy, for a larger voice for ordinary people—not unlike the New Left I was part of in the 1960s, which idealized participatory democracy.
Around the world, several other contemporary popular (or “populist”) movements have appeared that are narrowly nationalistic, or sharply opposed to current global trade policies. In some countries, strongmen preside over regimes that have a written constitution, hold elections, and have a superficially open public sphere; a few of these regimes (for example, in 2017, Hungary, Venezuela, and China) are proudly, and explicitly, illiberal—but that, in itself, does not make any of them undemocratic.
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AS A CITIZEN, even of a “flawed democracy,” I was free in January 2017 to protest a political leader whose character and public policies I found repugnant. But I was also expected to acknowledge, and peacefully coexist with, compatriots who preferred Trump’s policies and personal style. That is a part of what it means to be a citizen in a liberal democracy.
And as I contemplate what democracy has become in modern times, I find myself feeling uncertain about its future
(1) as a name for various actually existing forms of government;
(2) as an ideology, an ideal manipulated by a ruling elite in the material interests of a few, not the many;
(3) as a moral vision, of free institutions as a better solution to the problems of human coexistence than the authoritarian alternatives.
On the one hand, I am painfully aware of the challenges to democracy as an actually existing form of government—the challenges are manifold, and perhaps intractable, as I have tried to suggest in this short history.
On the other hand, because of a democratic faith that was instilled in me from birth, I find it impossible to renounce altogether certain moral and political principles. And even though the line between my considered ideals and what someone else might see as an internalized ideology is blurry, I find as a result that I harbor hopes that form part of who I take myself to be, and therefore inform my own picture of “who we are.”
My experience with participatory democracy has taught me the limits of any regime of consensus, which risks silencing disagreements over political alternatives that are important to debate openly. Our ability to reason and exercise sound political judgment is more limited than Condorcet supposed—rendering “the wisdom of crowds” a shaky assumption. But I also believe that modern institutions can do more to appeal to, and engage, people’s capacities for reflection and collective deliberation. As the American philosopher David M. Estlund observes, “We sometimes expect too little” from our liberal democracies “precisely because” we prematurely give up on an “aspirational theory,” a “normative standard that forces the question of whether more can realistically be expected.”
Modern commercial societies, when laxly regulated, are monstrous engines of inequality. But under a democratic form of government with a justly regulated economy—the aspiration of all social democrats and many liberal democrats as well—citizens would not only have equal civil and political rights; they would also know that those who are lucky enough to be born with greater natural talents are not going to get rich at the expense of those less fortunate: in such a society, as John Rawls put it, “men agree to share one another’s fate.”
The American experience itself proves that a liberal democracy, if one seriously tries to achieve this goal, can be egalitarian and inclusive, and welcoming to immigrants and outsiders regardless of their origin or religious faith. The American experience also proves that sentiments of solidarity can coexist with the kinds of self-reliance and self-determination prized by democratic individualists like Emerson and Whitman.
Still, it will always take effort to realize a society in which citizens are generally tolerant, certainly in America, where the struggle already has involved a bloody civil war over race-based slavery. It is hard to balance the natural yearning for a bounded community—the foundation for feeling part of a “we”—with the open horizons and pluralism of values inevitably produced by global networks of exchange (of ideas, of people, of goods). Practical wisdom may be found in men and women of all sorts—and as the British philosopher A. D. Lindsay put it, “a modern democratic state is only possible if it can combine appreciation of skill, knowledge, and expertness with a reverence for the common humanity of everyday people.” But so-called common sense is rare, particularly in people who are experts in some narrowly defined field of knowledge.
And these are just some of the reasons that it is hard to meet the manifold challenges to realizing democratic ideals in large and complex modern societies.
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IN THE VIEW of Václav Havel, the Czech dissident who helped guide his nation through its deliberately nonviolent transition to free institutions after the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the very difficulties facing modern liberal democracies will episodically lead to a temptation: people will conclude that political life, viewed realistically, “is chiefly the manipulation of power and public opinion, and that morality has no place in it.”
This literally de-moralized view of politics would mean, according to Havel, losing “the idea that the world might actually be changed by the force of truth, the power of a truthful word, the strength of a free spirit, conscience and responsibility—with no guns, no lust for power, no political wheeling and dealing.” If we abandon a virtue like truthfulness, we put at risk a public sphere created, in part, by acknowledging a shared reality, and a handful of core, common values, over and above the “hall of mirrors” constructed by competing political parties and the rival worldviews they propagate.
At the time Havel wrote his essay, in 1991, in a series of “Summer Meditations,” he was overseeing his nation’s reformation as the first freely elected president of post-communist Czechoslovakia. “I am convinced,” Havel remarked, “that we will never build a democratic state based on rule of law if we do not at the same time build a state that is—regardless of how unscientific this may sound to the ears of a political scientist—humane, moral, intellectual and spiritual, and cultural. The best laws and best-conceived democratic mechanisms will not in themselves guarantee legality or freedom or human rights—anything, in short, for which they were intended—if they are not underpinned by certain human and social values.” And here Havel is insistent: “I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.”
This is one man’s modern liberal democratic faith, plainly stated, without complacency or false confidence.
Democracy as a modern form of government may have first crystallized, as I believe, in the draft constitution Condorcet presented to the French Convention in 1793. But nothing like that consistently democratic document has ever been implemented anywhere. In part, this failure has occurred because Condorcet’s constitution presupposes a shared commitment to forging a society of equals, and the trend toward ever greater levels of social and economic inequality in many advanced industrial countries today, as documented by the French economist Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, if left unchallenged, effectively nullifies such hopes.
But the original revolutionary democratic project was also perverted when, in the hands of fanatics like Babeuf, Rigault, and Lenin, its partisans resorted to brute force and tried to level every single political opponent and institutional obstacle in its path. Václav Havel embraced a democratic revolution that was “self-limiting,” precisely because he had experienced, and abhorred, the historical alternative: “Censorship, the terror, and concentration camps are consequences of the same historical phenomenon that produced the collapsing centralized economy we inherited from communism. In fact, they are two dimensions of the same error that began with this ideological illusion, this pseudo-scientific utopia, this loss of a sense of the enigma of life.”
The right of a people to form free institutions through political self-determination, enunciated by both Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin at the dawn of the twentieth century, was undermined when peoples were placed under the tutelage of self-appointed external elites and efforts were made by evangelical democrats to export soviet socialist and liberal regimes at gunpoint. It was also recurrently scarred by insurrections and civil wars that in many cases produced not the new men and new women that Marx (and Frantz Fanon after him) hoped would emerge from the crucible of violence but a hardened ruling class, sometimes more ruthless and cynical than the tyrants it replaced.
Even in circumstances that are far less fraught, Condorcet’s key premise of an enlightened public opinion is more threatened than ever by official regulations keeping secret many aspects of executive decision making, and the increasingly sophisticated command and control of information by behavioral scientists and attention merchants, who are able to use behavioral data tracking and other new technologies on the Internet to aim messages with unprecedented precision at responsive audiences. Through online platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, contemporary political propagandists, both foreign and domestic, compete to mold the beliefs of ordinary citizens, most of whom lack equal access to either reliable information or political power in the imperfectly free institutions that actually exist in modern societies. Disinformation is easier than ever to disseminate to understandably suspicious, even paranoid, citizens over global communication networks. Along with the spread of government secrecy, these ever more sophisticated means of propagating lies and creating confusion form a standing threat to any modern democracy.
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STILL, THE IDEAL SURVIVES.
And democracy, once it is treated by large numbers of ordinary people as a transcendental norm, and functions as a shared faith, is open to being born again, as witness the so-called color revolutions in the Philippines in 1986, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, and Iran in 2009; the nonviolent, self-limiting revolutions in Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1989; the abortive umbrella revolution in Hong Kong in 2014; and the various popular protests in urban squares, from Tiananmen in Peking in 1989, to Tahrir in Cairo in 2011, to Maidan in Kiev in 2014.
Of course, the short-term results are often discouraging, and the goals pursued are sometimes illiberal, even catastrophic. Democratic revolts, like democratic elections, can produce perverse outcomes.
But because a longing for redemptive social change is ingrained in democratic ideals and liberal principles that are now deeply held and widely shared globally, I believe that it is not unreasonable to uphold, however skeptically, and knowing that these words represent a riddle, not a recipe, Abraham Lincoln’s characteristically American hope, especially in the darkest of times: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”