Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

late-night thoughts about democracy S 65
evidence indicates as well that public deliberation under the right
conditions does indeed increase both participation and the quality
of public dialogue.
But deliberation without fair and transparent elections is meaningless.
Steven Hill (2002; 2006) has written persuasively about
the need to improve the electoral system by ensuring that votes
are in fact counted, expanding voter participation, providing for
instant runoffs, scrapping winner-take-all elections, and providing
for direct election of the president, all of which are practical,
widely popular, and achievable reforms lacking only the political
leadership to implement them.
The future of democracy in the United States also depends a
great deal on qualities that are harder to defi ne, what de Tocqueville
called “habits of the heart,” which defi ne the kind of people we
are. The founders’ faith in the necessity of virtue was soon diminished
by reality, but stable democracy everywhere requires civil
people who tolerate differences and are willing to split the difference.
Can people lose the capacity for democracy? Both Madison
and Jefferson thought so, and in recent decades our own democracy
frayed as our political dialogue became more contentious and
narrowly partisan. “Wedge issues,” such as gay rights, abortion, fl ag
burning, and (since September 11, 2001) the most strident form of
patriotism, have driven out more substantive and important issues.
We are said to have become a conservative country, considerable
evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, including the election
results of 2008 (Hacker and Pierson, 2005). Whatever the truth of
the assertion, the conservatism of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity,
Anne Coulter, and Karl Rove has little in common with the principled
conservatism of the kind once proposed by Edmund Burke,
Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, Robert Taft, and even Barry Goldwater,
a conservatism that never took a fi rm hold in the United
States. Clinton Rossiter once said that genuine conservatism was
done in by twin forces of democracy (too much, too fast) and
industrialism, creating a “one-way ticket to social nonconformity,