This week’s essays include the following:
Today, with an international perspective, from Cora Chan on Liberal Enclaves inside repressive regimes. Cora is a professor of law at the University of Hong Kong. Ned blogged about this essay earlier today.
” if the center is much more powerful than the enclave, the latter’s liberal status can deteriorate rapidly once the former moves toward repression. Institutional behavior can change overnight; civil society can be forced into silence in months. But amidst it all, and this is my final point, there are remnants from the previous liberal era—traditions, legal doctrines, and habits of heart and mind—that serve to keep spaces that are not politically sensitive relatively free.”
Yesterday, Eboo Patel wrote on what we can learn from civil society about how to make institutions work. Eboo is the Founder and President of Interfaith America, the nation’s leading interfaith organization, and has been recognized as “one of America’s best leaders” by U.S. News and World Report. From his essay, The Bear, Tocqueville, and Institutions That Work:
“Tocqueville saw America’s strength in how people of different backgrounds learned to cooperate for a purpose larger than themselves. That’s exactly what we see in The Bear, FX’s critically acclaimed show about a scrappy Chicago restaurant.”
“Our democracy will not be renewed by the arsonists. It will be renewed by the architects—people who, like the crew at The Bear, devote themselves to institutions that endure and call us beyond ourselves into something larger, richer, and shared.”
From the business community, Mark Cuban wrote with an optimistic take on democracy and the technology revolution:
“…If you believe, like I do, that GenAI will create a new Generation AI and light tens of millions of sparks in kids that can shine a light on our country, from the bottom up, instead of the top down, you know that the best is yet to come.
This path will be messy and imperfect, but also alive. There has never been a time when democracy has been more “by the people, for the people” than today—and it will only become more so in the future. Our democracy isn’t collapsing. It’s working just as it should—just as it always has.”
Posts earlier this week engaged with Sam Moyn’s views on how to counter the rise of what he calls gerontocracy and Randy Barnett’s challenge concerning how people from diverse viewpoints understand “democracy” itself.
The NYU Democracy Project can be found here.