Democracy Under Siege
H istory repeats itself, often in a strikingly similar way. Democracy lasted 250 years in ancient Athens until privilege, corruption and mismanagement strangled it. American democracy, is now approaching 250 years, and it is desperately ill. D emocracy is under assault. We may think that these clashes are an aberration, a Mar-A-Lago Mussolini thing. But they are actually part of a troubling dichotomy that seems to be intrinsic to democracy itself. D emocracy is more than a bundle of laws, norms and institutions. It is an open culture of communication. Democracy affords people the right to think, speak and act and it allows every possible means of persuasion. Going all the way back to Plato's Republic, it's understood that the seeds of democracy include the roadmap to destruction in it's very DNA. It's understood that every democratic society is inescapably vulnerable to the consequences of communication. We may not like it, but something li...