20 Mart 2021, Cumartesi
saat: 18:40
Here’s a thought: democracy doesn’t work because someone -- president OR prosecutor -- comes and “saves” us from ourselves....Democracy works because citizens make it work for themselves.
"A Republic, if you can keep it" said Benjamin Franklin, to a questioner after being asked what kind of government had been created in Independence Hall in the summer of 1787.
Pretty much everything I think about politics derives from that last clause: "if you can keep it." Politicians can be demagogic, thoughtless and stupid. Media can be money-chasing sensationalists only truly worried about the second-to-second ratings their stories get online. Corporations can be self-interested and fantasize that the aggregation of endless self-interested pursuits will magically emerge as the community's interest. But citizens have to be smart. Citizens have to recognize what forces are trying to strip their power away for selfish ends. Citizens have to care.
“This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”
-Levitsky & Ziblatt, How Democracies Die
