Berlin would have warned us against hubris and intolerance, but also against fatalism. In the battle to come, history is on no one’s side. The outcome of this struggle over who owns the meaning of freedom will come down, as it always does, to the eternal question that decides history’s shape: who is prepared to fight hardest for what they believe.
There are simply no guarantees of democratic order. There is only the inherited belief that violence can kill democracy and that violence endangers everyone, especially those who would use it to defend democracy itself.
Once founded in a moment of revolutionary upheaval, democracies must manage their legacy: to ensure that revolutionary violence, sanctioned as a sacred necessity at the beginning, does not legitimize violence when democracy faces a moment of crisis, deadlock or extreme polarization.
The populist revolt against mainstream politics highlights tensions between majority rule and rule of law that are intrinsic to any version of democracy worth defending. Provided these questions are debated and resolved within the institutions of democracy itself, then the conflict is not a negative phenomenon, but a positive one, a sign of the inherent vitality of democracy.
Populism is one of those words that is dying from promiscuous over-use. […] I think what it means it is a general descriptor of any course of political action that does not command assent from a centrist elite of experts. Which means that it is not necessarily a bad thing at all. So we must not use it as a swearword, it may be a wakeup call. I am going to use populism to describe anti-elite, anti-institutional challenges, in the name of the people, to center right and center left political dominance of European politics.
When the authority of science and the authority of democracy conflict and the result is a stand-off, a legitimacy vacuum can ensue, with ordinary citizens distrusting government and scientific advisers in equal measure.
The current populist challenges in western liberal democracies should not be seen as evidence of their decline, but as a constituent part. The history of democracy shows us that such challenges enable democracy’s growth and evolution.
I certainly expected to walk away. Yet it soon became obvious that my work was not done, that closure is the last thing one should expect a completed biography to deliver. Once one role is completed, a new role emerges: defender and guardian of the flame. Here loyalty and truth come into conflict once again.
Representation is the contested relationship at the heart of our democracy. It is contested because the theory and practice of democratic representation have never been in close alignment. In theory, representatives should be either the trustees or the delegates of the citizens who elect them. In practice citizens do not usually share collective interests.
