Is What’s Old Ever New Again?

What distinguishes the first decades of the 21st century from other periods in history? One defining characteristic has been the language and experience of crisis—financial, institutional, social, political.

While these crises feel—and in many ways, are—particular to our period in history, they also beg the question: to what extent are we re-living versions of past moments of crisis? Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing in his Prison Notebooks composed during the 1920s, describes the crises of his time this way: “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Gramsci’s take on old and new ideas in a time of crisis was the starting point for a broader conversation about democracy at a recent event at New America NYC. “We’re in a period of not so much shedding old ideas as recuperating them, but with a great deal of creativity and a lot less rigidity than in the past,” said Sarah Leonard, senior editor of The Nation, pointing specifically to the influences of the Black Panther Party on #BlackLivesMatter and the May 1968 protests on the Social Solidarity movement in Greece. “The sharing economy,” she pointed out, is “another great example of a ‘new idea’ that isn’t new.”

New America Fellow Yascha Mounk looked further back, and found less optimistic precedents. For Mounk, “how we think about democracy may itself be becoming outmoded.” He sees similarities between how 21st-century citizens in the West approach democracy and how 16th-century Europeans thought about God: “everyone believes and it’s not possible to imagine not believing, but the accounts of belief are no longer convincing.” Throughout the West, said Mounk, we believe “that there’s something special about democracy,” but neither the average voter nor the political theorist “actually has a very good account of what it is about democracy that makes it so special.”

For Mounk, the ideas we use to think through democracy may not be new, but we do have new tools at our disposal. The Internet “pulls the rug from underneath democracy’s founding fictions” in Europe and the U.S. because it reveals the ways in which social and political institutions are “no longer capable of sustaining our values.” He views this as cause for concern but also as an opportunity for innovation: “It’s not a matter of the values having gone away…I think it’s a matter of figuring out a way of reinventing institutions that truly embody those values.”

Like Mounk, Slate writer Jamelle Bouie also looked to history to help him address contemporary crises. The period of Reconstruction “feels similar” to the moment we’re in now, which worries him. “Reconstruction didn’t end well,” and the specter of white supremacist oligarchy that followed it is particularly haunting in light of recent racial tensions in the United States. At the same time, the social instability today that reminds him of the post-Civil War era also gives him some cause to be hopeful, because it “leads me to think that our old ideas may have currency here.” We may need to re-mix those ideas a bit to apply them to contemporary situations, but there is comfort for him in realizing that “the problems we have are not new problems.”

Samuel Goldman, director of the Politics and Values program at George Washington University, took a slightly different approach. Our moment of crisis is defined neither by old nor new ideas, he said, but by “fragmentation” along national, local, and religious lines that is “amplified by the fact of the internet.” This fragmentation renders political and moral consensus obsolete, observes Goldman, and the “future as I imagine it…is in certain ways neo-medieval.” Goldman believes that “the world we’re facing is one that is dominated by transnational elites,” and the “traditional menu of options probably won’t be adequate to solving the problems that we face.”

These social and political impacts of the Internet and demographic shifts toward fragmentation on ideas about democracy were especially vibrant and contentious points of conversation. Even though the Internet exposes how alienated young people are from political institutions, Mounk agreed that it has been and will continue to be a “powerful tool for social organization.” When pushed by Leonard to elaborate, he replied, “People have become disengaged from our institutions because they see that there are other ways that are more effective of trying to influence what’s happening and trying to organize.” These ways of being socially active “don’t have anything to do with public institutions,” said Mounk, which presents a “really big shift” from eras like the 1960s and 1970s activism Leonard cited as influential models for today’s decentralized efforts for change.

Unlike Goldman, Leonard sees in decentralization an opportunity for more effective ways of organizing and “putting pressure on” institutions to better serve the people. Bouie cautioned against adopting this local-level approach wholesale, however, because of the risk of perpetuating systemic poverty and racism. History shows, for instance, that the only time “we get advancement toward material racial equality” is when there is a national commitment. “National democracy is worth finding a way to preserve,” he emphasized, “because I think we have these problems that are otherwise intractable.”

Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed, polled the speakers on whether they felt pessimistic or optimistic about the future of democracy and what “morbid symptoms” of crisis they view as most urgent. For her own part, Batuman described anti-government protests she observed in Turkey in 2013 as proof that “people who had nothing to do with each other could come together” to find a common voice—in this case, “Kurdish separatists [were] running arm in arm from tear gas with transvestites and members of the far right.” But whether such alliances are durable or can produce lasting change is an open question.

In his most pessimistic moments, Bouie reflected, he is disillusioned by the fact that “most Americans would rather have less democracy and more markets than the other way around.” “Our current economic arrangement,” he said, “is not necessarily compatible with the kind of democracy we want to have.”

Goldman aptly diagnosed each of his fellow discussants’ conflicted perspectives on the future by quoting philosopher Peter Augustine Lawler, “Things are always getting better and worse.” As for what comes next, Leonard and Mounk both agreed that the most interesting developments lie in building and sustaining institutions beyond government that can challenge the status quo.