Nobody Understands Democracy Anymore

an article by Shany Mor published in Tablet [grateful thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for this piece]

A wave of recent books warning about a ‘crisis of democracy’ reveals that even our experts are confused about how democracies actually work

Book after book in recent years has alerted us—as if we couldn’t tell by reading the news and absorbing the panicked media—that democracy is in crisis. Did it start with Trump or with Brexit? In Europe or the U.S.? The diagnosis varies among authors of different backgrounds and political persuasions, as do their prescriptions on what to do now. Not all of the books even share the premise that the loss of democracy is such a bad thing—at least one recent work argues that the real crisis was a democratic surplus.

What the books have in common, beyond their shared subject matter, is a common confusion over what democracy actually is. This confusion about the differences between democracy’s complementary functions like lawmaking and voting is, in its own way, rather illuminating, as the shared shortcoming in the books suggests a broader breakdown in democratic understanding that helped engender the very crisis they were written to address.

Probably the best, and certainly the most talked about entry in the “crisis of democracy” catalogue, is Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy.

Mounk was, at the time of the book’s release, a Harvard lecturer, and his well-timed tome has catapulted him into the world of celebrity academics. This clearly came as no surprise to his publishers at Harvard University Press, who put the book out with no fewer than four gushing blurbs from an exhaustive array of celebrity intellectuals ranging all the way from a Harvard AB (Dani Rodrik), a Harvard Ph.D. (Francis Fukuyama), a Harvard JD (Anne-Marie Slaughter), and all the way to a current Harvard professor (Michael Sandel).

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I found this well worth the time and effort.

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