Open Source is the world’s longest-running podcast. Christopher Lydon circles the big ideas in culture, the arts and politics with the smartest people in the world. It’s the kind of curious, critical, high-energy conversation we’re all missing nowadays. Be part of the action: leave a voice message to be played on the air; get in touch over Facebook or Twitter; or email us – info@radioopensource.org with show ideas, advice, requests and high-quality criticism.
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All in Favor…
A conversation about Astra Taylor’s new documentary What Is Democracy? with Astra Taylor, David Runciman, and Kali Akuno.
We used to know what we liked about that word ‘democracy,’ and we were ready to fight for it. Democracy meant “the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time,” as E. B. White put it during World War II. In Civil Rights time, Malcolm X rubbed in the rhyme with hypocrisy: a real democracy would never short-change so many people of justice, freedom, the dignity of equality. In our time it’s money that seems to have bound and gagged democracy. And it’s social media that has wired a sort of zombie democracy into world-wide waves of anger, and the values of circus entertainment.
Astra Taylor and Silvia Federici in “What Is Democracy?”
What can we say about our democracy when a Princeton study finds that the political preferences of the average American have “only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact” on public policy? The filmmaker Astra Taylor took the cue to write one more “death of democracy” book and to make a movie about her own global search for democracy over the ages.
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