So just to follow up here, I mentioned in the last video not taking adversarial relationship. That's a key issue when we're dealing with modern liberal thought that we'll get to in a second. Because the idea, a lot of our politics, like I mean, Western binaries reinforce the idea, let's look at the legal system.
An adversarial relationship is a key dynamic to the development and progress of a legal system. Why? Because we have two sides fighting to win and it produces the best outcome, right?
In politics, we have adversarial politics between parties because we believe that the rational and reasonable argument for ideas makes the best arguments come to the top. The reason that the honor and duty of the crown is so important here is that you cannot, and so I see this all the time when politicians or political thought exercises take an adversarial relationship with indigenous communities in Canada, you can't do that. You can do that if you don't like your constitution and you want to create a new one. But you set up this system and structures, you cannot do that. So every time I see a politician or somebody or even those thought exercises that take adversarial positions with relationship to indigenous peoples in Canada, OK, fine, get rid of your constitution.
Get rid of the 1763 Royal Proclamation, which is 1982 Bill of Rights. You've got to restart the whole thing. Have fun with that. Rewrite your constitution.
It's not, sorry, it's not our choice. The Queen said it. you've repeated it it's there over and over again you cannot take adversarial relationship adversarial relationships with indigenous communities in canada because the crown's honor and duty is honor is at stake so if you're going to do that you got to get rid of the crown sorry not my rules your rules so the idea here is that um when we're dealing with the contemporary thinkers they are trying to justify the systems we have through reason and argument and logic and philosophy um on their own merits. So it takes the idea of reason over religious authority to the logical extreme, that the idea of reason then should be the only system by which politics is based.
And so this is what a classic liberal believes, that we should have an honest discussion, debate of ideas. The best ideas come to the surface, and those best ideas should be how we govern society. It's why Fukuyama believes we're at the end of history.
There can be no more reasonable, logical debates. Now, he has a later book where he said that genetic modification can result in superhumans who then would restart history because their terms of discussion and debate would no longer be ours. They would be fundamentally distinct from humans. So again, we're bound up in the idea of what a human is and how they do this. So what this means for contemporary liberal thinkers, we need a purely reasonable justification for the liberal system.
We can't look at power and authority as existing outside of ideas. Ideas are the only way that we have this order. And so we shift the focus from freedom and equality or resistance to traditional forms of authority that we have in the emergence of this kind of reimagining of the Greek city-state into one that tries to frame things as the only good is what we agree on. And we all agree that the best idea we can come up with is respect of tolerance. That tolerance, again, this is totally reasonable, because if you have to tolerate anybody, you know sure as heck that...
you don't actually like them, you're just tolerating them, is that there's an emotional underpinning there. And that emotional underpinning, it's the return of the repressed. It's the idea that when you push something down inside, it always comes back in other ways. And so these are Rawls, John Rawls, this classic liberal thinker comes up with these ideas that we can never agree that we should worship one particular kind of God or that we should worship at all.
We can never agree that we should hold certain values when we're raising our children. We can never agree that we should mate in these and not other ways, and we never agree that we should. The only should we can agree on is to be tolerant of a variety of ways to which to worship, to instill values, to make family structures of kinship, and so on. So it's creating kind of a minimal threshold model. It's kind of like the best of the worst.
What's the bare minimum that a liberal society has to have as the foundation in order to be democratic? Well, it has to do this. It should, should, should, should, should.
Doesn't mean we will. So... So like Fukuyama, it doesn't mean that we're all going to be liberal Democrats. It means that the best we can aspire to is this.
I do think it is weird to talk about raising children and mating in the abstract and mating itself. Like, what if we don't want to mate? What if we just want relations? Anyways, what I'm saying here is there's a lack of gender in the framing of this. There's lack of intersectionality, lack of race, lack of settlement, all the rest of that.
So the idea here is that there's a debate between these different. People, so, you know, Rawls is doing this kind of minimal idea that we should tolerate or respect our differences. Whereas Charles Taylor and McIntyre, they say, no, no, no, it has to be more than that.
We have to do more of the Greek city state stuff. You have to actively engage, right? It's not enough to have everybody barely tolerate each other.
We have to actually, you know, to have civic virtue is to, you know, engage in political process, to vote, to have public dialogue, to make your ideas heard. to exchange ideas and then decide which ideas we come to some types of agreements on. And so political life is more than just the institutions and the representative structures we create.
You know, much of what we do is that we don't do alienation. So our inability to deal with those structures is as much how we think about politics as anything else. It animates social movements.
It animates civic associations. It animates, you know, somebody wants to show off their gardens. So they have a garden tour. Somebody wants to show off. I don't know, their farm, so they have a farm tour.
Somebody wants to show off their art, so they have an art tour. Those things all require forms of mobilization, resources, ideas, and they change the public order. And they often say that this then justifies public funds, which we share in common that we tax and then redistribute. And so...
These differences then are cultural differences, and here culture is doing a lot of work, because there isn't a theory of contestation per se here. There's just a theory of reasons differences, right? And so we can reasonably differ on what we argue is the best way to organize systems. Now, the textbook deals with this, and we'll do this as well. This political, again, totally sees the economic as secondary and outside, and doesn't have a a clear theory endogenously of how hierarchies exist, whereby some people get massive amounts of power and control and others don't.
Because they're not doing that work. They're trying to think of what's the most reasonable way to organize our society. That's the sympathetic reading that we should be doing. This is what we should aspire towards.
And we're coming up with the shoulds for everybody. The practicalities are always going to be a contested, you know, on the ground explanation. This is an analytical theory. right? And so there are, of course, radical critiques.
I'll just go right into them. The idea, of course, is that Marxism emerges from Marx's experiences of industrial capitalism in Britain when it emerges, right? This transition from feudalism to capitalism.
He's trying to think these things. And so real power is not the political institutions at all. It's back to those hierarchical structures. As I showed with that video, I wasn't...
intending to be intentionally Marxist or anything, just showing that hierarchical structures of feudalism, the hierarchical structures of capitalism look very similar, right? And to him, until you get rid of all those structures on the top, we don't have communism, right? And we want to get rid of all those structures on the top. And so the idea here is that the emergence of capitalism actually produces and maintains and creates greater inequality. Now, I'm not a Marxist.
I'll just put that out there. I understand the value of economic thinking. I don't like economic reductionism. But I do understand the arguments here that there is economic inequality perpetuated by capitalism. And that, you know, the market imperatives clearly have permeated many aspects of society.
So, you know, the idea of voting with your dollars now, we're contesting like what goods are bought. And is that... I don't know.
I don't even know if I want to have this debate. Are goods woke or not? It's so dumb, I don't even want to have it.
But the idea here is that we've now taken consumer practical kind of watch things I buy as deeply political questions, right? As somehow the market expresses politics rather than some type of higher aspirational ideal, like the liberal theorists, we want a better society. No, I just want better goods, right? Or worse goods. I don't know what And so all of these problems create perverse incentives.
You know, the argument has been that, you know, social media platforms putting out misinformation is not that they're being immoral, they're being amoral, because they're pursuing market goals. So Facebook is looking to maximize its advertising revenue. If Russia is willing to pay it to advertise myths or disinformation, so be it, right?
The problem, of course, is that... Social media systems and open systems are open, you get ideas, whatever you want, flat earth, I should wear my hat upside down, my shoe should go on my head, whatever you want in an open system, whereas in a closed system of Russia or China, and this goes back to the debate from the last lecture about which system's better, closed systems just say, no, we're never going to discuss Tiananmen, we're never going to have discussions about Putin's rule, we're not going to challenge these systems of authority. And so you have these closed systems interacting with an open system with active goals to sabotage it. heard a discussion the other day that Putin's most likely way to resolve the conflict in Ukraine is to make sure that the person who gets elected in the US is sympathetic to his goals, right? Like that's an easier way to achieve a strictly military goal through the open system from a closed system.
And so if we want to talk about class conflict, there's lots of ways in which we can still do that. I just don't know if it's the same as producing a political statement. Like this is a correlated outcome.
So for example, I saw this, I heard this in podcast the other day, almost all like investment venture capitalists money that exists are largely coming from the graduates of two schools in the US, Stanford and Harvard, that they're the ones who are most associated with it. Which is to say, as we know, you might not know, but Americans tend to identify where they went to school, where Canadians tend to identify what they took in school. Why? Because this is Our system, despite all of its problems, still tends to be oriented towards getting the degree in the area in order to get your job. Whereas in these cases, these are social sorting mechanisms.
You know, Harvard only lets in 3%, 3% or 4% of applicants. So it sees itself as social sorting. And then if you manage to get one of those degrees, firms can hire you because they know that you've got access to resources, networking, social status, and hierarchy.
more so than whatever it is you studied, right? And we can see the ways in which this is reproduced. And so this produces all sorts of problems. This is from Thomas Piketty's book on inequality.
It came out in 2015, 2016, I guess. And what he was looking at here is that if you want to talk about inequality, we can talk about inequality. This is both a good and bad kind of justification for the Marxist position. First off, capitalism has absolutely reduced inequality.
If we look at China, and the real income growth from 1978 to 2015, for the full population, it's went up 811%. So this is the biggest single reduction in poverty in human history. And I'm not going to take that away from capitalism.
It is weird that a communist system imposed capitalism, but we won't talk about that right now. What we're talking about is inequality. And so the reduction of that inequality is great.
I don't think it's great for people to be better off. I don't think... They have the capacity to engage in society. Now, part of this is a sleight of hand, because it's much easier to move people from a peasant to a kind of lower middle class income than it is to move everybody from a middle class income to a high income bracket.
There's a lot more resources required. And we've seen this. We go into the stats. I'm not going to do it here.
But just this shift has meant basic things like meat production has just skyrocketed. the demand for all consumer goods has skyrocketed because of this. And so this is a huge extraction of resources, but there's been general better off status.
Now, the problem, of course, is what during the same period happens elsewhere. So Piketty uses France because he's in France. We don't need to worry so much about that.
The US is the interesting mechanism here. So during this period, the US saw a 60% growth as well. The problem is, is that it was in no way distributed equitably.
So for the bottom half of the US population from 1978 to 2015, they saw no real income growth, which is say that whole 50% of the US population during that entire period saw nothing get better for them or their children. So you could understand why when looking at those systems, and let's be clear, China's ascension, the WTO allowed US companies to shift production to China. to sell goods back to Americans, that this system has benefited the top a lot and the bottom objectively not at all, right? So the middle 40, 42%, that's not bad.
It's not the middle 40 of China, which is 780%. And the top 10%, I mean, in China, they had a lot of way to go. The US, you know, it's only 115%. But if you look at the top 0.0001%, those are the billionaires.
And they've seen a growth of 685%. In democratic systems... you would think you could pass laws to make things equitable, hence the democracy, right?
Everybody gets a vote, everybody gets a say. And so what we've seen, though, is that for that bottom 50%, not only are the structures of democracy not resulting in them getting the same benefits as the rest of society, versus other countries, they're seeing a relative decline. And so that then means that this mechanisms taking place if the democratic structures aren't working the private structures are influencing the democratic structures such that the laws and rules are not equitably benefiting everyone we're requiring rationally everyone to participate in the system you know you have to vote vote or die blah blah blah but a bottom 50 isn't seeing democracy provide outcomes for them right just just not you Those other systems see capitalism providing outcomes, even in an authoritarian system.
The French are seeing kind of equitable because it's France. And so the Marxist critiques then are that there is private ownership of the means of production. There's private creation of wealth, but that we're not using public structures to make sure everybody benefits equally or to make sure that the public good is best served.
And this public good could be, yes, we all agree that we voted for the party that we wanted. The problem is in terms of these kind of material relations, those people participating in fully, maybe with good faith, participating in the system saying, I like this system because I'm going to do better in it. Them and their kids are objectively not doing that. And so this rights based model for private property has ensured that we have this, you know, prioritization of rights where the, you know, the right to life versus the right to housing can be inverted. And so much so where we have anti-homelessness or anti-the unhoused structures to deal with homelessness.
We're designing park benches now so people can't do them. We don't have access to public spaces or public washrooms in the same way. This is a real problem during COVID, right? And that, you know, we should be able to do things.
The democratic system should be able to pass laws to ban bank fees. And yet this fiction that somehow the system is the private property shouldn't be impeded by democracy. is undermined by the idea of the central bank, is undermined by the crypto bros, because the crypto bros said, no, no, we don't even need this in society. We're going to create our own currency. How'd that go for everybody?
And so this idea of regulation, right? Should we regulate or should we allow Ponzi schemes to pop up and everybody to lose their savings in a crypto scheme is two different notions about the relationship of government and private property and regulation. And so the arguments here, the Marxist critiques in the textbook are that workplace rules, savings and interest rates, corporate decision making, educational advancement, social reproduction of home and social reproduction of care are largely outside democratic processes. And so if they're outside democratic processes, they're being determined by market forces, and we don't have any say over them because of all of these assumptions we've made about liberalism, right? And so the idea here is that these radical democracy theorists, again, I'm not entirely clear who we're talking about because we actually don't have any references here.
And with no references, I'm I think that's a straw man. A straw man is something we build up in order to knock down, right? That's what we mean when we say straw man.
So straw man arguments are ones where no one's actually making that claim. We are saying someone's making that claim in order to then say, well, this is why it's not real. And so class, so the radical critiques here are that class is not only a source of inequality.
I think we've fallen back into the liberal trap of pitting marginalized groups against one another because they're not political. We're pitting the 260,000. against each other, rather than talk about why the 40,000 have full access to resources. And so again, I don't know who this is. But the idea here is that the radical democratic critiques are saying that Marxism and I agree with some extent, class isn't the only source of inequality or conflict, right?
We could frame it in those terms. And so there's disparities in economic and political power amongst men and women, white, non-white, indigenous peoples, global, north and south. I... I don't want to engage in these discussions. We can engage in these discussions.
I feel like they're disingenuous because I don't know who's making them. And I do know that they're directed at the group that traditionally don't have access to power and authority. So I should be suspicious.
I think we should all be suspicious if you're not willing to label things. And so we think this is easy enough to do to talk about inequality. This is the common one that they talk about in the US is the idea about how we should structure democratic participation.
So let's just do voting. We just do voting. Voting alone doesn't tell us anything, because if you have everybody vote in specific ways, if we frame things as fair, and we'll come back to what we mean by fair, that everybody who gets to vote, if it's 60% orange and 40% purple through these 50 people, we would have three orange and two purple, or three orange and two purple. We can try to get them proportionate to the electorate. What we see then with a lot of of democratic structures, they're not doing that.
We get five orange or two orange and three purple. We can change the way in which those are counted in order to produce different outcomes. The problem with this assumption of the radical democracy is that it can't actually make those claims because there are lots of weird problems that exist that voting alone can't resolve, right?
So the fear in the US's party, because the US has a binary oversimplification, in Canada, we have multiple political parties. So we don't think about parties as left or right, per se. There's a whole bunch of different parties across the spectrum, it's relatively easy to get in and have discussions and debates, if we still do political debates, because increasingly leaders don't want to debate because they say just pick me or not, right. And so the problem, of course, is that when we talk about voting, we can see like the average age of a member of Congress for both Democrats and Republicans in the US is pushing 60. You're talking about having 80 year olds as presidents of the U.S., that then means that there's a tacit system or structure that is not representing the age of the population of the country.
So we'd like to think about inequality and radical democracy in terms of, well, these people don't get their vote. No, even if they vote, the representatives they're voting for don't reflect them. So we could do that in terms of like, we've got the richest politician in every state. We have these, there's all sorts of stats on this, but like...
The average income of somebody in Congress versus the general public is so disparate. We could talk about the representation of sexuality. Do we have anybody?
Sven Robertson in Canada, first openly gay man who was elected to office, and increasingly we have trans and people with different sexualities being elected all over the world, heads of state and all the rest of this. If we have a democratic society, do we want that as proportional? Citizenship status, right? Back to the original question of the Athenian democracy. We have medics who get to teach us about democracy, but don't get to vote in the system.
We have residency. How long should you be able to be in an area and what should require you to vote? Do we want one person, one vote? What if people have two houses? What if you are at school during the school year and go home for the rest of the year?
Is your permanent residence the place, I mean, technically in Canada? permanent residence where you live 60% of the time, you should vote where your permanent residence is, which means you should be voting in London. Should you be voting in London municipal elections, off-cycle elections?
And if you are, the people who live in London full-time versus the students who are there for four years, are their votes the same? We can do this in terms of gender equality. So like this is Canada, the US and Mexico.
Canada and Mexico are much better on gender equality than the US. So if we're going back to gerrymandering a radical democracy, In terms of gender outcomes, this is awful. It doesn't even require the gerrymandering.
We don't have that. And income, right? So should the people who are being elected be in the same income bracket? Should they reflect that bottom 50%?
Because they don't. They just objectively don't. It's not capable of doing so.
And so when we're thinking about radical democracy, we need to think beyond this category of voting as being radically democratic because the... Category of citizen themselves can be much more inclusive if we're trying to get more representative structures, right? And the only way that that happens is not by picking the same leaders over and over again, it's by being unruly and demanding ways in which we do it.
It requires, justice requires an expansion of the idea of what is fair, right? Not the agreement that this system is already fair. And so contesting injustice is at the heart of liberal democratic society, but you wouldn't know it from this. textbook chapter, because we don't have any understanding of where those injustices come from. And we don't have a theory of the violence that is created by those systems and structures such as these producing all of these inequalities from the liberal democratic premise of one person, one vote, or from the idea that citizens should have the right to vote and other bodies shouldn't be represented in those structures.
And so the radical democratic position, again, I don't know who this is. But is the idea of the freedom to do more than vote, speak and organize, that we should have, you know, different levels of government do different things and talk about different issues. And so we would need to have representative representation in all those structures. And we know that in Western liberal democracies, they both disproportionately favor agricultural regions. They are overrepresented in all kind of liberal democratic structures and the elderly are overrepresented.
Those who are aged. um uh represent are more thoroughly represented in these democratic structures and so why is that um the liberal theorists say that's outside that's that's not part of our structures but at you know 200 years i kind of think your structure is partly responsible and so freedom to challenge and reject the status quo of politics and institutions outside formal structures challenging law making rule of law and democracy itself um seems to be what radical democracy is. So back to the original question of this chapter, why is democracy in crisis?
I think the point should be democracy is always a crisis of representation. So I don't get why it would just be now that it's not, I guess it's the ruling structures and authorities are being challenged. And the reason they're being challenged is the idea that, you know, that this liberal teleology of everybody just naturally reaching liberal democracy is being challenged because that bottom 50% back here, they don't see the benefits of a liberal democratic system in a literal sense, in terms of their income. Are they better off than the generation before them? Are they better off than their parents?
No, in this group. And so I guess it makes me sound very millennial. But the idea of them not being part of that group then raises questions about why they should think that liberal democracy is beneficial for them. I don't see why. That's only the case if the small minority who have benefited from it, there's minority because the bottom 50% has not been, that the small minority then that benefits from the system is shocked when the group that's not benefiting from the system is saying, we're not benefiting from the system, let's try something else, right?
And so the textbook write this chapter as if there's a natural teleology rather than this constant back and forth in the debate about ideas. And so we, as a textbook, I think we want a mono-vocal narrative, right? We want to have one thing that it tells us so that you can be tested on it, so that I can test you to say, this is the thing you have learned, that it is fact-based. But if the fact is contestation, it's not clear that a single universal understanding of what modern democracy is makes sense, that it's sensible.
We have this growing disenchantment with democracy that I can clearly demonstrate as to why, and that we have seen throughout this, all the way through, people are constantly contesting who has citizenship and who doesn't, and that our politics, back to ancient Greece, are about representing a small minority against the majority, but then we are told over and over again that somehow this shouldn't impact our outcomes. So this famous Princeton study in 2014 that's been contested all over the place, but the idea that the U.S. is better understood as an oligarchy, not a democracy, that the concentration of how we get our information in this society has never been more run by a small group, that we have businesses who do not have to contribute because of systems and structures in place that we don't have to say how or why they came about. But that bottom 50% is expected to contribute. And those at the top who are in that big growth part don't have to.
That the number of billionaires in the period just from 1990, not back to 1975, from 1990 to 2020 has gone from 66 to 614. So these systems and structures are becoming more unequal. And yet the textbook is somehow surprised that we're challenging liberal democracy. You can look at this.
The amount then is... that the parties are spending in those structures in order to get votes is billions of dollars. And that the billionaires then contribute more and more to those billions of dollars so that the politicians, back to this question that this Princeton study came up with, said that the donors to the political parties are more likely to have their policies represented than those who vote. So if it is not an, if it is an oligarchy, not a democracy, then It's weird.
Again, these are all political donors in the Fortune 500 tend to be the similar ones that pay less taxes like a Microsoft than others. And then this idea that democracy in crisis is somehow unpredictable. It doesn't make any sense. The meme didn't show. We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.
The liberal premise can't figure out the ideas of why liberalism and democracy are being challenged. disenchantment with a process that clearly isn't manifesting in specific outcomes for the bulk of the population. And so we see these specifically expressed, Occupy Wall Street, Idle Down War, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Black Lives Matter, those groups that listen, they're definitely part of that bottom 50%.
But they're part of that bottom 50%. Remember, Dubois said that whiteness is a psychological wage. It allows one group of people to think they're superior to another, even though in all material terms, they live, grew in the exact same area, and they're just as poor as one another. They're just as poor.
I know they're just as poor. They're the bottom 50%. They're just as poor as one another, but then they utilize those mechanisms as forms of...
hierarchy and control, as if hierarchy and control matters. It's the carrying of this issue. So there is a relationship here to the disenfranchisement with the process, because they're not seeing benefits from it, that then results in forms of contestation, as we've seen all along. And so the idea of the year in protest, millions of protesters across different continents, dissatisfaction with politicians and democracy itself, and I mean, the textbook thinks it's inexplicable. I tend to say that it's not really that hard to figure out.
And there's a slide towards a liberalism around the world because even the, you know, the beacon on the hill, America was always seen as the beacon on the hill, the exceptional model that we could aspire towards. Post 9-11, it's hard to see it as a beacon on the hill and Guantanamo Bay still exists, right? As a illiberal prison, you can call it that.
And so this slide towards illiberalism then is a broad-based, it's got support, and it's broad-based because these structures aren't being required to impose greater democracy. And so we have the rise of these far-right parties that are pitting one group that might not be getting ahead against another group that might not be getting ahead. And so the question isn't, I don't think it's the people don't see the value of democracy.
I think it's the democracy isn't demonstrating their value to the people. And so if democracy isn't being democratic, and I can demonstrate that it's not being democratic, the problem is democracy itself. It's not the people being upset with it.
And so, you know, like I said, I don't really want to get into this. All of a sudden, it's inexplicable that during the pandemic, people who don't see benefits, and for example, I mean, many like the trades and you know, probably some of you having to work at grocery stores. We're just like, throw those people.
We're going to all stay at home. But those people who work in the trades and the jobs that we can't have, they just go out there. Well, we're willing to risk their lives.
And so these have disproportionate impacts on the poor and the vulnerable, not randomly, right? Like compounded by existing inequalities and marginalized communities. Yeah. Underscored the critical role of government in mobilizing resources and protecting citizens.
That's what they took from that. Okay, they took from this contestation around all of these issues that the government needs more resources. I said, I can't even, this doesn't link to any of those previous arguments.
It doesn't make a ton of sense to me. It doesn't make a ton of sense to me so much so I wrote a freaking chapter on it because it doesn't make any sense to me. You cannot understand how the responses to COVID happened without understanding the role of markets, the role of race, and the production of ignorance by those minority.
in group who are just shocked when things don't go the way that they thought they would. And so when we're talking about democracy in crisis, maybe, we call them racial injustice movements in Canada. I think we need to distinguish between settlement and race.
Specifically in Canada, we have long used the idea of let's bring in settler populations, immigrant populations from throughout the Commonwealth and abroad on settler territory, and then be like, well... What do you mean? These people just got here.
They're not involved in the problems and structures that are involved in the settlement repression that's gone on since the origins of the Canadian state. Anyways, I'm not going to get into it. We'll get into it much later in the course and throughout the course.
I don't want to get into it now. What I would say is that democracy in crisis is as much about democracy as always been in crisis than anything else. We have lots of examples. They change the conversations about state violence. Sure.
I mean, but I'm I'm pretty sure those communities have always had these conversations. Respectability politics have been around forever, right? Use reasonable discussion to make your arguments to a majority population. And if that majority population votes for the minority, then we'll give you those rights.
It's been fundamentally flawed since ancient Greece. Calls for better forms of democracy, sure. Contrast with attack on the U.S.
Capitol building. Again, I don't know what you think. think they were in favor of what they thought democracy was, is that I get to vote as a majority and I get my interests upheld.
And then when that structure starts breaking apart, we're shocked that the people who were given the psychological wage of feeling superior no longer feel superior and they rebel. I don't know. I don't know what that stuff is.
I'm not interested in kind of having those discussions. What we need to... to the conclusions of the chapter, fine.
We can trace the idea of democracy or contestation all the way back, politics of democracy all the way back to ancient Greece. Um Government and process have been more inclusive. I mean, I guess so.
I think religious authority, believing that you're not going to, you're going to literally go to hell if you don't participate in our systems and structures seems a bit more invasive, but sure. Future of democracy is contested and uncertain. Yes, I think it always has been.
I think the idea that it disappeared and didn't show back up, that it disappeared in ancient Greece and didn't show up until the 14, 17, 1800s, probably a good indication that it's Always contested and uncertain. And there's all those reasons why that that is the case. And I don't disagree with any of those. All right.
That is the end of democratic ideas. I tried to be as sympathetic, but sometimes I just get frustrated with the assumptions that we're not being critical of better critical ideas. So yeah, that's it.