Excerpts 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.
We know too much about the people we know. Hipsters and Hasidim in Brooklyn do not much benefit from direct contact; direct democracy tends to drift away in difference.
The essential compromises arrive, instead, through the proceduralism of representative democracy. In New York City, council members (whose names most of their constituents may not even know) meet and bargain over who’s to pay for education and how to keep the rats away and the streets clean.
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.