Democracy 2.0

As someone who disapproved of George W. Bush on most fronts, I fully agreed with Daniel Larison’s comments on how many people who are so offended by Donald Trump never showed a proportional revulsion to Bush:

“One of the remarkable things about this election is the sheer intensity of hostility to Trump from many of the same movement conservatives who shrugged at Bush’s far more serious betrayals and failures… (People that now panic) didn’t care when Bush expanded the security state, trampled on the Constitution, or launched an unnecessary war of aggression.”

Or is there a deeper, more fundamental change going on with the very idea of democracy, wonders Santosh Desai:

“Think of yesterday’s ‘cooler’ democracy as a wire that transported energy from the public to the state, but one that came clad in protective insulation of many kinds. What we are seeing today is the gradual stripping of this protective insulation.”

And today?

“The democracy of today is thus a ‘hot’ democracy, an unmediated, volatile force that reacts quickly and responds sharply, with few restraints. Hot democracies are immediate, reactive, judgmental, demanding.”

Social media and the Internet have contributed to this (obviously):

“The idea of the public too has changed- it is now a multitude of privates, the visible emergence of the individual as part of the public. In some sense, everyone is out in streets all the time, telling us what they think. And by seeing everyone else saying what they really feel, others are emboldened to express themselves with much less inhibition.”

All of which leads to Desai’s conclusion: if social media increasingly charts the course of democracy, then the signs aren’t exactly good:

“If we really can get what we want, then it all boils down to what lies buried deep inside our hearts. And on that front, the news may not be so good.”

Is the world heading for a new form of democracy where demagogues will be the norm?