Majority tyranny / Ancient grease

Today: Please join us in welcoming new Hydra contributor Nathan Schneider, author and media studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Miles Klee, author of the novel Ivyland and culture writer at Rolling Stone.

Issue No. 208

Democracy Against Democracy
Nathan Schneider

Twenty-One Reactions to Seeing Those Assholes Eating McDonald’s on a Private Jet
Miles Klee

Democracy Against Democracy

by Nathan Schneider

I am a professor who has spent the past decade arguing that there should be more democracy on the Internet. There is a certain convenience in this position. Democracy can sound either radical or respectable, depending on who's listening. Who would disagree with democracy?

But then, when I gave talks in various pandemic-era international Zoom calls, I started to hear a troubling critique. It came first from digital rights activists in India. Their concern about democracy was not its slowness or inconvenience—normally the worry among Americans—but the dangers of majoritarian rule. This was not an abstraction but a reality very much manifest in their lives thanks to the duly elected, ethno-nationalist regime of Narendra Modi. Thanks to democracy, or at least the Indian ballot box, they had to resist a government that was trampling on dissent and reclassifying non-Hindus as second-class citizens or worse.

I could choose to consider the billion-and-a-half inhabitants of India an exceptional case, or insist that real democracy depends on rights, and not only votes, and thus draw my definitions carefully around the inconvenient case. But now the cause for that critique is coming closer to home.

In a United States that now anticipates its second Trump regime, I have to recognize that those voices from India were speaking to me from a future that is now fast approaching here—a future that has already arrived (to paraphrase the William Gibson quip) but has been unevenly distributed.