Liberal Democracy Lives on the Page, Not the Screen

“Here, I would like to reflect on the optimal mechanisms for sustaining the rational mindset that undergirds liberal democracy.”

As Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist No. 1, liberal democracy is the product of “reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force.” The normal state of human governance consists of tribalism, oppression, and violence, whereby “we” compete with “them,” sharing little by way of respect, rights, and mutual responsibilities.

Liberal democracy offers an alternative, in which we resist our natural, tribal urges and instead reason our way to concepts like universal individual rights and the consequent desirability of democratic procedures, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. According to Stanford University’s Francis Fukuyama, such liberal practices amount to “an institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity.” Concepts like toleration, mutual forbearance, and respect among political equals do not arise naturally. They are products of certain Enlightenment strains of thought, and we must continue to reason our way toward accepting and sustaining them, day in and day out.

Here, I would like to reflect on the optimal mechanisms for sustaining the rational mindset that undergirds liberal democracy. In other words, what are ways in which citizens can be dissuaded from their natural impulses to fall into tribalism, and instead be persuaded to continue reasoning their way to supporting liberal democratic principles?

One such mechanism is the written word.

Conducting liberal democracy on a mass scale presents certain challenges, which I discussed in detail in my Merion West review of Walter Lippmann’s classic book, Public Opinion. In short, there is a bit of a knowledge problem in mass liberal democracy, as Lippmann sees it. The citizenry lacks direct experience with (and knowledge of) so much of political consequence. When our political debates are conducted on a mass scale, there is a greater probability that their connection to our real lives will wane. The substance of the local townhall meeting is concrete, tangible, and familiar—not so with much of the discussion in the halls of Congress in Washington, D.C.

To bridge this gap, we rely on the news media. If we are to sustain our liberal democratic, rational mindset, we would be better off relying solely on word-based news media to bridge that gap—think newspapers and magazine outlets like this one—rather than televisual media.