What is democracy? It’s a simple question with many complicated answers. For her 2018 documentary of the same name, activist and filmmaker Astra Taylor traveled to locations as disparate as Athens, Greece, and Raleigh, North Carolina, to pose this question to Syrian refugees, college Republicans, and philosophers such as Cornel West. What she learned also informs her most recent book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, a meticulous examination of the tensions that emerge when any community is governed by “the people.”
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The Sun Interview
An Imperfect Union
Astra Taylor On The Inherent Conflict Between Capitalism And Democracy
Correspondence
Astra Taylor says, “When people say, ‘Trump’s not us,’ I think, Maybe we need to see how he is us, so we can prevent this from happening again” [“An Imperfect Union,” interview by Finn Cohen, November 2019]. This is a stark admission that more folks must come to grips with.
Taylor accurately outlines the obstacles to a real populism based on one person, one vote — especially how the burden of debt restricts our political self-determination. Our real situation is clear: since the concentration of wealth undermines political equality, we must start taxing wealth at the rates it was once taxed.
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November 2019
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