A wonderful,contrarian book captures Twitter-era politics and the danger of allowing democracy to be eroded from within“Democracy dies in darkness” runs the slogan on the Washington Post masthead, but whether democracy really is dying around us, or its demise has never been so loudly heralded nor so brightly lit. Even before Donald Trump’s emergence as a presidential candidate,it was clear that the global trend away from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones had slowed down; his rise was accompanied by a barrage of authors’ warnings that we are heading back into the 1930s. Never have the final days of Weimar seemed so worthy of study. Historians have developed a nice sideline in self-assist manuals for a life of underground resistance to tyranny.
David Runciman’s bracingly clever recent book is both a contribution to this debate and a refutation of it. How Democracy Ends shares the widespread sense that representative democracy is not doing well, but argues powerfully against screaming fascism at every turn. History, and as Runciman states at the outset,does not repeat itself. The challenge he sets himself is to exercise the past to see what has happened to democracy today, in particular to diagnose its ailments, and without assuming that the only alternative is the one imprinted on our collective memory.
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Source: theguardian.com