Breakout working group from a session at Fearless Cities on 'Building non-state Institutions'. Bertie Russell. Liberal democracy was supposed to be the end of history, remember? The last political product you’d ever need to buy because it’s so convincingly good. But just look at it now. In most countries it works at half cock, being undermined by mass abstention and populism; or else its existence is threatened by oligarchs and autocrats who see it as a useful means to legitimise their regimes. Indifference, apathy, cynicism, disillusion, ignorance and disengagement are rife. Sometimes you have to wonder whether democracy is worth bothering with at all.
Clever political analysts in the universities of the west say we face a stark choice: take action to save democracy or start planning its funeral. They take a practical, managerial approach to the problem. They know what is best for us and they want to direct us along the right course. They can tell us exactly what “liberal democracy” is so that we do not have to think things out for ourselves.
These “Directors of Democracy” work from high vantage points in Yale, Harvard, Oxbridge, London, Paris. They cosy up with politicians and move in the circles of the state and of the national media. Their narrow range of political experience leads them to make two assumptions that they are not challenged on because they mostly debate with others of their own kind
