For @ForeignPolicy, I wrote about how we need to refocus on a principle that supposedly all US citizens should share: democracy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/25/building-a-shared-worldview-among-democrats-and-republicans-could-be-more-dangerous-than-healing/

I've heard "we need a shared reality" from several places lately, and while I understand the appeal- it's part of the impulse that built Information- and there are certainly some horrific & dangerous lies that I wish people didn't believe in, it's both unlikely & problematic.

When people say "a shared reality", they expect that reality to be the one they see and believe in; or, to put it another way, they believe that they are seeing reality & everyone else is deluded. Not everything is relative & I wish people weren't vulnerable to manipulative lies

but when you extend from trying to debunk preposterously untrue conspiracy theories - as difficult and painful as that is - to an entire shared reality or worldview, you run into a few problems. 1st, there has never been an entirely shared worldview, not at any kind of scale.

and to the partial extent that there has been, it requires teaching everyone that it's the only correct worldview. Take the example I use in the article: the Lost Cause. Generations believe those lies about the Confederacy, and why? Because they were pervasively taught them.

Those lies are in textbooks, they are supported by statues and parades and flags. And if you think that makes the people who believed in them credulous, think about what you know of your country's history, and how much comes from textbooks, statues, parades.

A shared worldview means you lose opposition, weirdness, discussion. Further, we know very very little about reality; any "shared reality" is going to be wrong in some ways, and imposing it means we lose clues to possible alternatives.

Yes, I hope that when I discuss alternatives and differences, I can do it with people who haven't been manipulated into believing purposeful, calculated lies and with people who have the critical capacity and contextual knowledge to reject those lies.

But that's very different from wanting everyone to agree with me, even on broad-strokes "reality."

But we do need something to cut across the ingrained, partisanship & reluctance to find a basis for discussion among a lot of people in a lot of countries incl the U.S. Rather than a shared reality, I propose a shared principle & one we already believe in (supposedly): democracy

There are, evidently , lots of comemierdas out there in public life who don't believe in democracy and believe only in power for themselves. For the moment tho, democracy is still a powerful enough concept in the US to require the pretense of allegiance. We should use it for more

This is not patriotism. Patriotism is easy to fake and impossible to prove, not even the last refuge of scoundrels any more but the first checkbox of political consultants, neatly ticked off with a flag pin in the lapel. Ugh. Patriotism is propaganda.

Democracy, on the other hand, is something we can measure. We're astonishingly bad at measuring it, but we can at least point to things that are NOT democratic and say so, and we should be doing that.

ESPECIALLY if that means we have to turn back to all the undemocratic things we have been letting slide: gerrymandering, DC not having Congressional representation, people needing to take time off from work to vote. Undemocratic. We should change them.

Suppressing the vote is undemocratic. Dismantling approved voting mechanisms like the post office is undemocratic. Refusing to commit to a democratic handover of power is undemocratic.

Let the people who don't believe in democracy say so and justify why. I'm open to finding a better form of governance, but I know it's not "let those in power keep power."

For the rest of us, if we do believe in democracy, if we want to claim that as our form of governance, let's start acting like it.