Democratic Government

The essential problem, as Rosenfeld sees it, is that democratic government is predicated on an aspiration to collective truth. Unlike older systems of aristocratic and monarchical rule, which excluded the people from power and stressed the need for administrative secrecy, the new republics of the late 18th century, and the more egalitarian mass democracies that succeeded them, depended on openness and trust between citizens and rulers. Through the free discussion and united wisdom of the educated and the masses, errors would be dispelled, "public knowledge" established and societies advanced. And yet, she points out, the reality has never lived up to this powerful idea. From the outset, democratic societies contain vast inequalities of power and education, and their media have always been driven by commercial and partisan imperatives. In practice , instead of a free civil marketplace of ideas, politics has always been a vicious fight over the truth and the power of determining it.