Catch-up service:
America’s Still Functioning Democracy
Why I Don’t Believe In Centaurs
On the Sally Rooney Case
The Optimal Margin of Delusion
How Civil Should a Disagreement Be?
Peak Burnham
Podcast: Is AI Really Going To Kill Us All?
Why Is the Left So Bad at Education?
Last week I suggested that America’s midterms were not just good news for the Democrats, but for democracy. For much of this century, it seemed as if America was on an inexorable path towards a rigid stalemate, with voters locked into epistemic bubbles, unable to agree on basic facts. Party and tribe beat country. The arc of the American political universe seemed bent on civil war.
Insofar as that prognosis was ever convincing, it became less so after last week. This electorate did what electorates are meant to do: it punished bad policy and checked an unpopular leader’s power. Voters responded to real issues: prices, war, corruption. About 3.6 million 2024 Trump voters picked a candidate from the other party. The Democrats are on track to win 56% of the House popular vote (a figure that aligns with the number of senators they are expected to end up with). The last time either party did that was 1974, in the wake of Watergate.
Perhaps it’s not ideal that it took a leader as mad and bad as this president to depolarise America, but these results were nonetheless reassuring. For those in the political middle or on the left, they were cathartic. As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times remarked, this felt like the first time most Americans responded to Trump in a normal way. You shouldn’t have to be a Democrat to see that this president has behaved recklessly and destructively, and as it turns out, you don’t.
It got me thinking about a recent piece by Joseph Heath, the Canadian political philosopher. In his attractively world-weary style, Heath offers a lucid analysis of why liberal democracy will always feel somewhat imperilled.
