Rhymes from Central Europe
Related:
Europe’s New Autocrats
A Warning from Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come
Anne Applebaum notes:
“Polarization. Conspiracy theories. Attacks on the
free press. An obsession with loyalty. Recent events in the United States
follow a pattern Europeans know all too well.”
Lessons from History:
The Basic Problem of Democracy by
WALTER LIPPMANN – Published in NOVEMBER 1919
“The world about which each man is supposed to have
opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding. What
he knows of events that matter enormously to him, the purposes of governments,
the aspirations of peoples, the struggle of classes, he knows at second, third,
or fourth hand. He cannot go and see for himself. Even the things that are near
to him have become too involved for his judgment. I know of no man, even among
those who devote all of their time to watching public affairs, who can even
pretend to keep track, at the same time, of his city government, his state government,
Congress, the departments, the industrial situation, and the rest of the world.
What men who make the study of politics a vocation cannot do, the man who has
an hour a day for newspapers and talk cannot possibly hope to do. He must seize
catchwords and headlines or nothing.”
Related:
Interview – Francis Fukuyama
Stanford Political Scientist Fukuyama notes:
“Another urgent area of concern, he suggests, is the
need for politicians to address the ways that the internet has acted as an
accelerator for identity politics, with social media allowing individuals to
listen to people in just their own narrow group and not have any sense of
national or wider conversations.
“The idea was for it to be a tool of democracy, to
give people access to information and therefore to power,” he says. “But I
think all of the editors and the ‘gatekeepers’ and the fact-checkers that
characterise the old media were actually extremely useful – in simply slowing
down the spread of false information and guaranteeing a certain minimum level
of quality. All of that is gone now. So basically anything you see on the
internet seems as good as anything else you see on the internet.””