From “To Fix Democracy, First Figure Out What’s Broken”, by Adam Gopnik/The New Yorker. September 25, 2023:
The primal act of healthy democracies is the social bargain, and its product is an idea of citizenship that in itself depends on the coexistence of different kinds of groups. Citizenship is an escape from clan identity.
Abstraction is the enemy of personal empathy, but it’s essential for equitable elections. Villages are communal, but they aren’t truly democratic. A level of abstraction is necessary to imagine other citizens as equal agents with rights, not clan histories.
Hipsters and Hasidim in Brooklyn do not much benefit from direct contact; direct democracy tends to drift away in difference…The essential compromises arrive… through the proceduralism of representative democracy.
The civic bargain between hipsters and Hasidim in Brooklyn takes place precisely because they don’t have to sit together and misunderstand each other. Professional politicians are a necessary social class.
As the late sociologist Howard Becker explained, all social systems need unofficial experts who can mediate between competing groups.
Liberal democracy isn’t to be saved by attaching it to a particular political or economic program, because this is exactly what it doesn’t demand.
John Stuart Mill, the apostle of the liberal order, understood better than anyone that all of social life involves half measures and partial truths, and that committing irrevocably to a single economic program means putting an end to the possibility of using empirical experience to test it.
The point of democratic government—as Pericles insisted, Cicero understood, and Mill demonstrated—is to make a wary practice of coexistence into a principle of pluralism.
As Franklin Foer points out… politics at its best is “a set of practices” by which “a society mediates its differences, allowing for peaceful coexistence.”