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Look, I get it. Your eyes crust over when you read this stuff. Mine do too. Im here to talk about the whistleblower as a significant cultural figure in 2019; this piece was my idea and Im already bored with it. The problem with writing about whistleblowers is that it means writing about corporate and governmental malfeasance. The problem with writing about corporate and governmental malfeasance is neatly contained in the soul-crushing word malfeasance itself, with its depth-siren promise of sentences with too many prepositions and timelines you cant follow and language that sounds like it was scraped off the pavement after being struck at high speed by an 800-page committee report. The leak, in 2016, of terabytes of previously unseen financial records, some extending as far back as the 1970s, from the accounts of hundreds of offshore entities, whose intricacies revealed some of the manifold ways in which international banking and legal frameworks may enable the wealthy and powerful to skirt their tax obligations. Sir, I thank you, but no. Fold me into a bright yellow express pack and DHL me into the sun.

It is not human nature to want to pay attention to this stuff. It is human nature to want to pay attention to things that are fun and cool, and that make you feel good about yourself. You dont want to read about high-level regulatory corruption in the Hectare Enforcement Division of the Bureau of Weights and Measures. You want to read about the Rockets. You want to read exquisitely crafted personal essays about how social media is changing the diaphanous landscape of the self. You want to look at pictures of drunk bears. Maybe the bears could be hula hooping? Tolstoy basically wrote War and Peace to demonstrate that even in the midst of world-historic eventsin this case, the Napoleonic Warsmost people are still overwhelmingly focused on their own lives and interests and that this personal and domestic focus is a more powerful shaper of history than the orders given by generals and emperors. Historians may disagree with Tolstoys analysis, but I still say War and Peace is the most incisive novel ever written about human natureonly partly because it includes a chapter about a drunk bear.

So heres how were going to do this. Were going to start by picturing a plane falling out of the sky. Not the actual moment of fiery impact. The moments just before. Say youve just taken off. Youre in your seat, still getting settled, still feeling around for the power outlet so you can charge your phone, and because youre a human being and therefore interested in things that are fun and cool, and that make you feel good, youre not paying attention to the flight path or the sound the engine is making. Youre plopped in 32F, sipping the last of your airport Vitamin Water (they only had dragonfruitblech) and scrolling through the entertainment options. Wow, you can watch The Greatest Showman in so many languages! Youve got to remember to text your friend about this as soon as the Wi-Fi comes on. Which has to be soon, right?

Then the bottom falls out of the plane.

Hold on to that feeling for a secondthe moment when you realize it wasnt just turbulence, the plane wasnt going to right itself, you were falling, it wasnt going to be OK. Well come back to it.

But now lets change stories. Imagine youre a cadet in the Coast Guard Academy. Being in the Coast Guard is something youre serious about. Your dream, even. You cant pass by a coast without thinking, Oh, buddyam I ever going to guard the shit out of you. Because youre a human being and therefore focused on your own life and interests above abstract historical concerns, you dont enter the academy hoping to pay attention to the institutional culture of the Coast Guard; you just want to do your work and get ahead, like everyone else. But your instructors treat you differently from your classmates. You do the same work but get less credit. They insult you in front of your peers. They bully you. They single you out. Luckily, theres a system in place that allows you to report harassment. So you tell your story, trusting that your superiors will make sure youre treated fairly from now on.

Nothing happens to your instructors. Instead, the Coast Guard retaliates against you. Your next performance evaluation is ridiculously, unjustly poor. You spoke up about being mistreated, and now theyre trying to destroy your career.

Hold on to that feeling, alsothe moment you realized the organization that was supposed to protect you from bullying was going to side with your bullies against you. Well come back to this too.

Now imagine your kid is being held in a detention center. Doesnt matter why, doesnt matter how you feel about it. The state says your 8-year-old needs to be locked up, so hes locked up. But hes really, really sick. The state, in taking charge of him, also took responsibility for his health. But the medics who come in to look at him say hes fine, its nothing serious. Hes getting worse. But even though they barely examined him in the first place, they wont do anything more. Theres nothing you can do.

And thats a third feeling for youthe moment you realized you were powerless to help your own child.

These three stories are not metaphors. They actually happened to real human beings. Two Boeing 737 Max airliners crashed in late 2018 and early 2019, killing 346 people, everyone on board, all passengers and crew members on both flights. A Coast Guard officer who correctly reported harassment through officially approved channels was punished by her bosses. And ICE systematically denied adequate health care to immigrants held in its prisons, leading to multiple deaths and preventable crises. In 2017, an 8-year-old boy had to have part of his forehead surgically removed to stop an infection inside his skull. It had been left untreated after an ICE medical team diagnosed the excruciating weeks-old pain in his head as swimmers ear.

None of these tragedies happened randomly or through bad luck. They all happened becauselets avoid the language of malfeasance heresome evil assholes were willing to hurt and even kill other people if it meant making more money, or protecting their own power, or getting ahead. Boeing executives, we now know, rushed the development of the 737 Max, cutting corners in order to meet their launch targets, because who cares about passenger safety when the stock price is at stake? Coast Guard officers broke their own rules in order to preserve their complicity in an ingrained culture of abuse. And ICEwell, lets just say that its hard to imagine that an excessive concern for the welfare of immigrant children is the path to the top of that particular organization.

We know this stuff happened because regular people came forward and told us. When you think of the word whistleblower, you probably think of The Whistleblower, the still-technically-anonymous (but-Republicans-are-openly-saying-his-name-on-the-House-floor) intelligence officer whose report on President Trumps attempt to extort Ukraine into investigating Joe Bidens son led directly to our current impeachment crisis. But the fact is that a lot of dark things are happening all the time in this country, some of them right out in the open but a lot of them in secret, and the only way we ever find out about most of the secret ones is that some regular person decides not to act like a gangsterdecides, in other words, that theres a moral value higher than institutional loyalty. Whistleblowers are the most significant cultural figures of this year not just because one of them precipitated historic impeachment proceedings against an American president, but also because no one more vividly symbolized the plight of the well-meaning citizen in a democracy sliding over the edge of normalcy. No one more eloquently conveyed how regular people can, and also cant, fight back.

Whistleblowers didnt, in the parlance of internet year-end roundups, win 2019the opposite is closer to the truthbut no one else told us as much about where we are as a country, or about where were heading. The beeping of a life-support system doesnt win a hospital room.

Still, whistleblowers were everywhere in 2019. This was the year when the least anonymous whistleblower alive, Edward Snowden, published a bestselling memoir. It was the year when Steven Soderbergh released a movie about the Panama Papers, the terabytes of previously unseen financial records, some extending as far back as the 1970s, from the accounts of hundreds of offshore entities, etc., which were sent to journalists by an anonymous whistleblower in 2016. It was the year when Chelsea Manning, fresh off a failed Senate run, went back to jail for refusing to testify against WikiLeaks. It was the year the production company behind The Farewell and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood announced a new biopic about Reality Winner, the whistleblower who, two years ago, leaked a classified NSA report about Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Winner will be directed by Susanna Fogel, and will treat its protagonistwhos still in prisonas a mouthpiece for a generation of young people who are struggling to square their personal ethics with the crumbling ethics of our countrys institutions.

It was the year when dozens of new whistleblowers came forward, far too many to list here. The three I highlighted above arent the biggest of the year; theyre the biggest of mid-December, thanks to a pair of congressional hearings and a BuzzFeed News report on health care in ICE detention centers. If you want to know how bad things really are out there, set a Google alert for whistleblower. Theres no quicker way to get a deep sense of the algae bloom of institutional corruption currently underway in America. Everywhere you lookbanks, businesses, police departments, local governments, regulatory agencies, the White Housethe biggest cheaters have control of the rulebooks. Where you once had the idea that American institutions were relatively clean, though with inevitable pockets of corruption here and there, these days its easy to feel that the scam has metastasized, spun itself up into something bigger than a scam, something more like a default atmosphere. In a world where energy lobbyists run the EPA, corruption is the expected state; whats abnormal are the occasional pockets of holdout integrity. Thats the context in which the whistleblowers of 2019 spoke up. Of course, there are whistleblowers with bad motives and whistleblowers who lie outright because human beings are human beings, and a percentage of them, in any conceivable category, will always be terrible. But for many whistleblowers, in this climate, coming forward represents an extraordinary act of faith in a democratic society. You have special insight into how badly broken the system is; now, youre trusting the system to protect you as it heals itself.

Hard polling data on whistleblowers as a class is hard to come by, in part because whistleblower stories tend to be dominated by single individuals: Assange, Snowden, Manning, etc. Theres evidence to suggest that the public regards individual whistleblowers of the charismatic Wiki-hacker type with ambivalence; thats what polling from the 2010s tends to suggest, and its in keeping both with our general polarization and with the legitimately complex nature of some high-profile whistleblowers leaks. This is another reason whistleblowers are so fascinating: how you feel about, say, Snowdens actions is a valid key to your deepest feelings about the whole concept of a democratic state. Do you accept the idea that successful statecraft requires secrecy? Do you think citizens have a right to know what their government does? What wins out between those two imperatives? What do you think matters more, following orders or following your conscience? Many whistleblowers end up facing criminal prosecution or de facto exile, which suggests that leaders who like their executive authority unchecked, a designation that includes Barack Obama as well as George W. Bush and Trump, feel they have political cover for going after them. But the persecution goes only so farObama commuted Mannings sentenceand is balanced to some extent by signs of cultural approval. On the one hand, accusations of treason. On the other, awards, book sales, laudatory biopics.

I have never achieved a sufficient level of political sophistication to understand how anyone can feel that the person spying on them is their friend, and the person who exposes the spying is their enemy. But then, if democracy were straightforward, I guess wed be better at having it. In any case, it makes sense that the public view of whistleblowers would be conflicted, because one of the pictures that emerges from a consideration of whistleblowers in 2019 is of a country that no longer knows itself. Whistleblowers are the system-failure warning of a nation thats changing from one thing into something else, without knowing how or why. That is: American society is already corrupt enough to generate a steady stream of whistleblowers. But its still idealistic enough to give many of them a high-profile hearing (in the media, before Congress). But then its teetering so wildly between those two alternatives that its just as likely to punish them as to act on their revelations. Often, in fact, it does both.

The other picture that emerges is of the nature of the wrongdoing itself. Remember what we were saying about hard-to-follow timelines and sentences with too many prepositions? Much of the institutional crime thats being committed in America is nightmarishly, spectacularly dull and hard to follow. It involves chains of shell companies, misfiled expense assessments, and appropriations accounts routed through improper channels. It wouldnt make for a remotely listenable true-crime podcast. (And then the executive waived mandatory reporting on the independent safety audit: A sentence that might kill several hundred people, but wont sell a lot of ad reads.) Even the impeachment of the president, with its background of indeterminate meetings between intermediaries and email threads and back-channel phone calls that happenedwhen exactly?lacks the punch of a good story. Its a stunning, historic event; it is also kind of boring to think about.

And this is by designif not intentional design, then by a kind of Darwinian channeling. Because democratic institutions can maintain their integrity only when people care and pay attention. Absolutely the best friend that abuse of power can have, it turns out, is your natural, human, Tolstoyan desire not to be bored out of your mind reading the eighth paragraph of a news article on a Tuesday, and theres someone called Aldringham in it, and you cant remember who Aldringham is, and none of it has anything to do with youexcept that the fate of the world may hang on it, which doesnt seem all that relevant when you have 12 tabs open on a Tuesday. The people who are cheating you and running the world have figured out how to make the process of doing those things look really, really tedious; if they had accidentally made global domination look fun and cool, theyd never have gotten away with it. Trump is useful, in this sense, because hes so good at being Not Boring about stuff thats slightly extraneous; hes the magicians bejeweled left hand flitting over the cards while the boring old right sneaks the ace in his pocket.

The whistleblower is the person saying, hey, its in his pocket. And maybe it worksmaybe youre listening. But maybe youre paying attention to something else, because this movie is kind of slow, and you still have five hours to go on this flight, and was someone just talking about cards for some reason? And then you dont look up until the bottom of the plane falls out.

See the rest here:
The Whistleblower Is a Window Into Our Democracy - The Ringer

Its like watching someone you love die of a wasting disease, she said, speaking of our country. Each day, you still have that little hope no matter what happens, youre always going to have that little hope that everythings going to turn out O.K., but every day it seems like we get hit by something else. Some mornings, she said, its hard to get out of bed. It doesnt feel like depression, she said. It really does feel more like grief.

Obviously, this is hardly the first time that America has failed to live up to its ideals. But the ideals themselves used to be a nearly universal lodestar. The civil rights movement, and freedom movements that came after it, succeeded because the country could be shamed by the distance between its democratic promises and its reality. That is no longer true.

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are often incredulous seeing the party of Ronald Reagan allied with Vladimir Putins Russia, but the truth is, theres no reason they should be in conflict. The enmity between America and Russia was ideological. First it was liberal democracy versus communism. Then it was liberal democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy.

But Trumps political movement is pro-authoritarian and pro-oligarch. It has no interest in preserving pluralism, free and fair elections or any version of the rule of law that applies to the powerful as well as the powerless. Its contemptuous of the notion of America as a lofty idea rather than a blood-and-soil nation. Russia, which has long wanted to prove that liberal democracy is a hypocritical sham, is the natural friend of the Trumpist Republican Party, just as its an ally and benefactor of the far right Rassemblement National in France and the Lega Nord in Italy.

The nemeses of the Trumpist movement are liberals in both the classical and American sense of the world not Americas traditional geopolitical foes. This is something new in our lifetime. Despite right-wing persecution fantasies about Barack Obama, weve never before had a president who treats half the country like enemies, subjecting them to an unending barrage of dehumanization and hostile propaganda. Opponents in a liberal political system share at least some overlapping language. They have some shared values to orient debates. With those things gone, words lose their meaning and political exchange becomes impossible and irrelevant.

Thus we have a total breakdown in epistemological solidarity. In the impeachment committee hearings, Republicans insist with straight faces that Trump was deeply concerned about corruption in Ukraine. Republican senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, who is smart enough to know better, repeat Russian propaganda accusing Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 election. The Department of Justices inspector generals report refutes years of Republican deep state conspiracy theories about an F.B.I. plot to subvert Trumps campaign, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the promoters of those theories, who pronounce themselves totally vindicated.

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Democracy Grief Is Real - The New York Times

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'Huge Step Toward a More Inclusive, Representative Democracy': NJ Restores Voting Rights of People on Parole and Probation - Common Dreams

Speaker Nancy PelosiNancy PelosiRepublican group targets Graham in ad calling for fair Senate trial Trump attacks Schumer at fiery rally in Michigan Schumer, Pelosi to meet as Democrats debate tactics MORE (D-Calif.) on Wednesdaykick-startedthe hours-long impeachment debate with a speech stating that the House mustmove to impeach President TrumpDonald John TrumpRepublican group targets Graham in ad calling for fair Senate trial Democratic presidential candidates react to Trump impeachment: 'No one is above the law' Trump attacks Schumer at fiery rally in Michigan MOREin order to protect the republic.

Pelosidescribed the role of the House as being the "custodians of the Constitution," saying that Trumpput his own interests ahead of those of the nation when he invited a foreign nation to interfere in an upcoming presidential election in a way that would benefit him politically.

"Our founders' vision is under threat from actions at the White House," Pelosi said on the House floor, wearing all black as she faced her colleagues on both sides of the aisle. "That is why today as Speaker of the House, I sadly and solemnly open the debate on the impeachment of the president of the United States."

Pelosi began her floor speech by asking House members to recallthe meaning ofthe Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag, emphasizingthatthe debate over two articles of impeachment charging Trump with high crimes and misdemeanorswill center around the line in the pledge: "The Republic for which it stands."

And she concludedher remarksbypraising the legacy ofthe late House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah CummingsElijah Eugene CummingsOvernight Defense: House poised for historic vote to impeach Trump | Fifth official leaves Pentagon in a week | Otto Warmbier's parents praise North Korea sanctions bill Pelosi opens impeachment debate: 'Today we are here to defend the Democracy for the people' Pelosi announces Porter, Haaland will sit on Oversight panel MORE (D-Md.), whodiedearlier this year,as well as praisingothermembers for showing courage with their vote to impeach Trump.

"Today we are here to defend the democracy for the people," sheconcluded.

As the Speaker walked off the House floor, Democratsroseina standing ovation.

Democrats argue that Trump dangled the promise of a White House meeting and nearly $400 million in critical U.S. aid as leverage to press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation into former Vice President Joe BidenJoe BidenDemocratic presidential candidates react to Trump impeachment: 'No one is above the law' Trump rallies supporters as he becomes third president to be impeached On The Trail: A historic vote that defines legacies MORE and unfounded claims that Ukraine also interfered in the 2016 election.

Republicans, on the other hand, have described the impeachment as a "sham" and "hoax" designed by Democrats to bootTrump from office because they cannot beat him at the ballot box.

Democrats and Republicans are expected tospend roughly six hours onthe House floordebatingthe propriety of Trump's contacts with Ukraine, before the final votes on the articles of impeachmentaretaken up by the lower chamber.

The two impeachment articles abuse of power and obstruction of Congress are expected to pass largely along party lines, making Trump the third president in the nation's history to be impeachedand the first to run for reelection after such a vote takes place.

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Pelosi opens impeachment debate: 'Today we are here to defend the Democracy for the people' | TheHill - The Hill

A runner at sunrise in Washington, D.C., December 19, 2019(Tom Brenner/Reuters)Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place, by Robert B. Talisse (Oxford University Press, 216 pp., $29.95)

For the past several years, there has been a flood of commentary about how politics is poisoning social life, from first-person stories about surviving holidays or breaking off romantic relationships to surveys about the precipitous drop in inter-partisan friendships on college campuses. There are many who think this is a reasonable state of affairs: that the personal is political and that it is therefore only natural that all of a persons social perceptions and choices be suffused with the eerie light of political analysis. But there are also those who dissent. These dissenters say that Americans need to relearn how to disagree with one another productively; the strength of our public dialogue and of our democratic process itself may depend, this crowd says, on our having more and better political discussion and more interactions with those outside our bubbles.

In his new book, Robert Talisse, a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt University, agrees with the dissenters that our politically polarized and politically saturated culture is not in good shape. But he disagrees about the solution. Calls for bipartisanship and cooperation are insufficient, Talisse writes, and in a way misguided. More and better politics cannot be the solution . . . because politics is the problem. Americans are overdoing democracy in that politics has become practically inescapable, and hence we have to put politics in its place.

To make his case, Talisse relies on a combination of philosophical argument and empirical research. He tries to demonstrate first that it is possible to overdo democracy and that overdoing democracy follows naturally from currently dominant lines of thinking in democratic theory, including the high value placed on political participation and political deliberation. One of the most interesting parts of this argument is a discussion of the notion that everything is political. In one sense, if this were true, then it would seem impossible, as a matter of definition, to put politics in its proper place: Its proper place would be everywhere. But the claim that everything is political equivocates on the meaning of the term, Talisse argues. While its no doubt true that a full history of most objects or situations we encounter would involve some reference to politics, it is also true, Talisse says, that such a history would involve nonpolitical elements. It makes no sense, then, to treat the political element as the defining one.

I think Talisse could have pressed this point even more insistently. Viewing all human activity through the lens of politics distorts our understanding of life and siphons much of the beauty and wonder out of human affairs. Witness the recent proposed innovations to Seattles mathematics curriculum, which entail changing it to include stories about how math marginalizes and oppresses, how its been the tool of this or that evil ideology throughout history. Art, science, and all sorts of hobbies and forms of entertainment are similarly distorted by a focus on politics. Politics ideally shouldnt enter into such things. They should be like the Thanksgiving dinner table, which Talisse mentions as a space where political debate is generally improper.

Talisse focuses next on two recent sociological trends: political saturation and belief polarization. Both are explained in part by political sorting. This concept was made famous by The Big Sort, Bill Bishops 2008 book about the increasing tendency of Americans to live in communities of the like-minded. Talisse explains that as various technologies make it easier and easier to connect with other people, they also give us greater power to choose whom to associate with, and people usually choose to self-segregate based on homophily, the love of those most like us. This leads to a world in which news networks, zip codes, and even coffee shops are coded by politics. Such a world is ripe for saturation and infiltration by politics, and especially by what Talisse calls lifestyle politics, because as our political identities have become who we are, politics has become everything that we do. The idea that the personal is political, or that everything is political, turns out to be not only a mainstay of a certain kind of academic theory but a clever marketing ploy of which all sorts of companies take advantage. This helps explain the rise of the woke corporation, which caters to customers needs for conspicuously political consumption.

Polarization is a familiar phenomenon. But here too Talisse makes some useful comments, distinguishing among various kinds of polarization and then specifying just what belief polarization entails: arriving at more-extreme beliefs because of social homogeneity. One flaw of this section of the book is that Talisse seems to treat polarization as obviously irrational, as some sort of unavoidable tic of the tribal nature of human psychology. But some philosophers have begun taking the view that polarization may be rational that it involves a reasonable response to the evidence available in ones social group. Ultimately, though, the resolution of this debate is not as important for Talisses purposes as identifying the basic phenomenon.

Talisses proposed solution to these problems is that we devise social venues of nonpolitical cooperative endeavor. He develops a few ideas about how to do this. First, we have to cultivate what might be called civic virtues, of reasonableness, sympathy, and persistence. Second, we have to form civic friendships, in which we regard others as equals participating, despite our disagreements, in shared social enterprises directed to the same constructive ends. One step toward this goal is turning on ourselves the diagnostic tools we are accustomed to deploying only against others. We must see ourselves the way we see our enemies: as irrational, immune to evidence, and so on. Once we realize we are equally prone to error, civic friendship becomes possible.

One thought-provoking distinction Talisse makes is between the notion that democracy is being threatened by an outside force and the idea that it is being threatened by its own excesses. Many academics and other writers have, in recent years, advanced the former idea: Whether it is white nationalism, Trumpian populism, technocratic elitism, or left-wing identity politics, something that is itself anti-democratic and foreign to democratic politics is said to be corroding democracy. Talisse thinks this is the wrong way to look at things. Though democracy is, he writes, perhaps the single most important social good there is, it also has inherent in it certain dangerous tendencies. At least, these tendencies are inherent in current academic conceptions of what makes democracy good, which favor participation and deliberation as democratic ideals. The danger is that it may be precisely as political deliberation becomes more popular and political participation becomes more widespread that politics outgrows its rightful place. Our best theories about the value of democracy also seem like blueprints for outcomes such as polarization and saturation.

At a theoretical level, its not a Herculean task to distinguish Talisses solution to the problems of political saturation and political polarization his idea of cordoning off spaces from politics from the view that holds that people need to improve their skills at disagreeing. Talisse calls the latter idea the Better Democracy view and contrasts it with his view that we need less politics, not better politics. Unfortunately, he does not devote much space to comparing these two approaches, so it is sometimes difficult to evaluate which one is better, or even to understand what exactly the differences are supposed to be.

At a psychological level, the solutions both views call for are likely to be not only compatible, as Talisse sometimes acknowledges, but nearly identical. A recent study on intellectual humility and political perceptions from Duke University psychologists Matthew Stanley, Alyssa Sinclair, and Paul Seli, available so far only as a preprint, seems to show that low intellectual humility that is, a lack of willingness to consider that one might be wrong is correlated with unwillingness to make friends across the political aisle.

One can never be certain that such studies will hold up to scrutiny and attempts at replication, but the result is pretty intuitive: It is precisely the perception that ones political opponents are unreasonable or misguided in a way that makes them bad, or even evil, that leads one to interrupt and even replace other social activities with political debate. After all, we can all think of views heinous enough to lead us to engage in such disruptions of social life: advocacy of genocide, perhaps, or genuine interest in the upcoming film Robin Hood 2. So intellectual humility about disagreements seems required if we are to avoid seeing every belief we dont hold as tantamount to such awful views, which in turn is a requirement for maintaining spaces free from politics. We might think, therefore, that adopting such humility, which is a prescription of the Better Democracy view, is also a precondition for implementing Talisses vision.

This is ultimately a minor point, though. Overdoing Democracy is a rich introduction to both democratic theory and political sociology. It summarizes and engages with several different kinds of academic literature without inundating the reader with names and references. And its central claim, that Americans are overdoing democracy and that politics therefore must be put in its place, is demonstrated simply and convincingly, with great intellectual force. The book is sophisticated without being intimidating and current without being trendy. It should be a reference point in discussions about the scope and divisiveness of democratic politics in America for years to come.

This article appears as Too Much Democracy? in the December 31, 2019, print edition of National Review.

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'Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place' Book Review - National Review