A sobering, but hopeful message
A wonderful book.
This quote stays with me (E.B. White quoted in “How Democracies Die” (Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Penguin, Random House - UK, 2018, pp. 230 – 1)):
“Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the ‘don’t’ in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booth, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is the idea, which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad….”