The “state of democracy” has been a popular discourse in recent years, to put it mildly. There’s a whole genre of books and think pieces about all the threats to democracy — both here and abroad — and how to save it.
But the majority of that work focuses on the familiar dangers we’ve all come to appreciate, like polarization or authoritarianism or election denialism. That’s all good and very much worth discussing. What you don’t see quite as often are actual defenses of democracy as an idea and a way of life. It’s almost like this is just taken for granted. But if democracy really is in danger, then we could probably use more reminders of why it’s worth defending in the first place.
Enter a new book by Astra Taylor called The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart. Taylor is a writer, filmmaker, and activist, as well as one of the co-founders of the Debt Collective.
In 2019, she wrote one of the best recent books I’ve read about democracy, called Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. It was a defense of democracy to be sure, but it was also honest about the paradoxes and contradictions baked into any democratic experiment. This new book feels a little different. It toggles back and forth between policy, history, and philosophy, and it builds a case for collective action on the basis of our shared human vulnerability.
I am obviously here for this kind of thing, so I invited Taylor onto The Gray Area to talk about the book. Below is a brief excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.
Sean Illing
An interesting point you make in the book is that insecurity is part of the human condition and something we all experience one way or the other, but it can cut both ways:…
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