Newsletter #450 — April 30, 2026

by Heidi Burgess 

We started our conversation with Gideon, as we often do, by asking him to tell us his story — what he is doing now, and how he got there.  He started work as a science writer at The Economist, during which time he traveled from one foreign bureau to another, first Mexico City to Moscow to Jerusalem, and then to the U.S.  Then he went to MIT Technology Review and then to Wired. 

So I had this career that sort of started out in science and tech, went into international affairs and foreign policy, and then gradually came back to tech.

When I look back on that time that I spent as a foreign correspondent, it is important to keep in mind that I grew up in the '70s and '80s.  I was 18 when the Berlin Wall came down. And so I'm very much of that generation that grew up on the notion that after the Soviet Union fell, democracy had won. Everything was going to be great from now on.

And so I'm also a generation that was disappointed when that turned out not to be the case. [As a foreign correspondent] I was asking the question, "All right. Democracy has won, but how long is it going to take to actually appear? What's holding it back in all of these different countries?" Which, in retrospect, is maybe kind of a naive way to approach those jobs. But I think, in some way, that was my underlying animating question. 

And then I got to the US. After a few years in the US, I started to realize that, like we all did, that democracy here was not in such great shape either. And so I became very interested in the question of what is wrong with democracy as a system? Why is it dysfunctional everywhere? What are its shortcomings? ... So I started asking myself the question, "If you were to design something that had the goals of being democratic today, what would that look like?" So that led me down this path of trying to investigate what it would look like to reinvent democracy.

In a part of our conversation that I didn't quote, Gideon used the term "so-called democracy," and I asked him why he referred to it in that way.  He had two reasons.  First, he said, 

We should remember that the systems that we have today in which there is universal suffrage and many safeguards of liberal democracy, and checks and balances, and all these institutions were very, very gradually cobbled together over a very, very long time.

When the US was founded, the founders did not like the term "democracy." They associated the word "democracy" with Athenian democracy, which in their view had been a terrible disaster, and lent itself to mob rule. The very idea of the "republic" that they created was meant to temper the passions of the mob and create these institutions that moved slowly and allowed deliberation and allowed the intelligent people to make their decisions. And, of course, voting in those days was extremely restricted. 

So when we talk about democracy today, and how we have democracy, we tend to forget that history. We tend to forget the fact that the system that we have wasn't designed to be a democracy in the first place. It was designed to create a reasonable, deliberative process among a certain elite of people who were judged to be capable of the kind of decision-making that was required to run a democracy. So everything that we have now was bolted onto that, in kind of a Rube Goldberg style.

The second reason I say "so called" is that ... the American Republic was created in a world before we had the railway or the telegraph. Information moved no faster than a horse. The world was not globalized in the way it is today. Technology did not move at the rapid pace it does today. And so the systems that were created for people to have a say in governance were either town hall meetings or voting. Town hall meetings were for the local level, and voting was for the national level and the state level.

Town hall meetings are a very effective way for people at the local level to debate when the community is small and when people are able to have a say. And de Tocqueville, when he visited America, observed how vibrant American society was. People were very active in local life, in their communities. They were joiners. They took part in things. That was effective when you had a small country, small communities, and an ability for people to really be involved in the civic life. And voting worked as a system when information traveled so slowly that an election was really the only feasible way for citizens as a whole to have a say in the country and in the national governance of the country. ...

But if you were doing that today, if you were trying to create a system today that gave people a say in affairs of governance, there would be many more ways of doing it. Some of them would be more technologically enabled than what we have now. We're still using the system that is rooted in that horse and cart technology. 

Using technology, we could upgrade from horse-and-cart democracy to computer-based, AI-assisted democracy.  For instance, he said, you could use technology to enhance citizens' assemblies, which right now are very time-intensive and expensive.

You could maybe have a smaller group of people that is doing the in-person deliberations, but then giving a wider group of people the opportunity to weigh in on those deliberations online and for their opinions to be counted and contribute, or maybe influence the people who are doing the in-person deliberation.

Similarly, you could use technology for a much more enhanced version of what we now have as the public comment period on a law. Right now, Congress proposes a law or somebody's proposes a law or regulation. It's posted. There's a 60-day period for public comments. It's really hard for lawmakers or policymakers to meaningfully read those comments, especially if there are a lot of them, and for those to actually have a meaningful input on the process. But with AI, with large language models, we can now scan and analyze millions of comments from people, and figure out what are the main opinion groupings in those comments. 

We could create sort of AI avatars where a politician could speak to a virtual person who represents each of those opinion groupings and can talk about their reasoning and can also share individual anecdotes that people have provided. That would be a way to create interaction with public opinion that is much more detailed and granular than an opinion poll. And that gives people's individual opinions much more of a chance to be expressed, to have much more impact. Of course, there's the whole problem of how do you deal with fake comments? How do you deal with people polluting the system with AI-generated spam? So there are a lot of technical questions there. But that's an example of how you could better involve people's voices.

And there are also ways of using AI to make people better-informed citizens. Again, there's a problem of how do you ensure that people are actually seeking out information or being delivered information that makes them better informed, as opposed to being pushed further into their echo chambers. None of these is a solved problem.

But the general gist here is that there are ways to both inform people better and solicit their opinions and their viewpoints on things in a more ongoing way in between elections that allows them to participate but doesn't require them to spend hours in a town hall meeting arguing with people. And I think that's the critical thing. As I said earlier, we still primarily have two extremes. You can either vote or you can spend hours in a town hall meeting. There aren't many meaningful ways to participate democratically in between those two. And I think that technology gives us the opportunity to create some of those ways, where you can have a contribution, but it doesn't have to take up all your time.

For a short video explaining some of these possibilities more, see Gideon's talk Democracy 2040: A vision of the future. (Spoiler: it's wonderful!)

We also talked about how many people aren't receptive to the idea that we need to "save democracy," because they don't see it as a system that works for them. 

So much of the Democratic Party's messaging around Trump was, "He's a threat to democracy." And there was a kind of finger wagging about it, I think, a kind of, "You'll miss democracy when it's gone." But nobody tried to explain why. 

Or they tried to say, "Authoritarianism is bad." But the reason that that didn't work, I think, is that people understood that authoritarianism is bad, but nobody was convinced that what we have, what we call "democracy," is significantly better.This goes back to what I was saying earlier. First of all, it's a "so-called democracy." People don't feel like it really is representative of them. A lot of people have been left behind, and that's what Trump tapped into. Manufacturing was offshore, and rural communities were abandoned, and social safety nets were weakened. And all of these factors meant that a large part of America's population was left behind. You could say that that wasn't because of democracy. It was because of bad policies. It was because of the neo-liberal consensus. And all of that is true.

But what it meant was that people thought, "Well, okay, the supposedly democratic process is supposed to lead to better outcomes, because it allows the most competitive or most valuable ideas to surface. But it hasn't worked for us. It hasn't achieved the social benefits that it should have. It hasn't achieved widespread prosperity." 

And then people obviously got worked up about other issues like immigration that Trump tapped into very well. And so democracy, as a concept, had no value. And the people who were promoting democracy, like those funders or like the Democratic Party, just forgot and lost sight of that. They didn't understand that. They took it for granted that people thought democracy was a good thing. 

So, how do you convince people democracy is a good thing?" I don't think it helps to say,  "You'll be sorry when democracy is gone." And it's not fixed by giving people a civics class and trying to explain to them why it matters. So what is it? That's a little harder to answer. 

I think what the pro-democracy forces... need to form a grand narrative, a meta-narrative, about democracy, not as a kind of a bulwark against authoritarianism, but as something positive that actually brings you benefits. And they need to make the case for how it can do that. And I think that narrative has to tie in somewhat to what kinds of values we want to have as a society, what prosperity means, what freedom means. ... They have to tell the smaller stories that give people a sense of belief in democracy, not by talking explicitly about "this is democracy and it's good," but by showing examples of democratic practice. They need to show examples of local communities coming together to solve difficult problems, show examples of people fighting against an unfair system, overturning power and giving the people more of a say and that coming out better for people. So stories that turn this abstract idea into felt, lived personal, concrete experiences. 

Since Gideon is a journalist, we also talked about journalism.  I asked him, "But how do you do journalism when a) people don't trust the media, and b) people don't think there are such things as facts.  Gideon reworded my question.

I think the question is, "how do you create demand for journalism that is based on facts?"  ...  I think that there is a case to be made that when you bring local communities together around a shared problem, and that could be a zoning question, or it could be problems of water quality or homelessness or some other issue that affects the local community. If you can create the forum where people from across the community from different political backgrounds come together, recognize the problem that they have to solve together, are given tools for solving it together, then they also are going to need sources of information that everyone in that group can agree to trust. And local media can play that role. 

And so the question is, how do you pull all this together? How do you create those local forms of shared deliberation, that sense of shared problems, and then shared information sources? And there are some projects around the country that are trying to do that. I'm going to visit one later this month called Civic Lakes in Lexington, Kentucky, where they have done a bunch of work where they are simultaneously holding community events. They're holding a local civic assembly. They provide local journalism and reporting on city council. They provide explainers. They fund block parties. They fund art events. They kind of do all of these different kinds of stitching together the local community in different ways and adding a layer of local journalism. So that there is a trusted information source that everyone can share in. That's what I mean by creating demand. You have to make people want a source of information they can all trust in order for you to be able to then produce that source and then do it in such a way that they can trust it. ...

So that problem of trust is based, in some sense, in the media catering to the audiences it was serving and those audiences having a certain political leaning. ...The business model requires them to serve the audiences that they have. And so in part, you could say it's not their fault, because it is a function, a product of the way that urban and rural communities have shifted politically. But the media also, I think, were unaware of this. The mainstream media were very bought into this idea that they do objective journalism and that they just report the facts. And it's part of the mythos of how American journalism works. And it lost sight of the extent to which what they chose to cover is shaped by who they're reporting to, who they're reporting for. So, I really struggle with this idea of journalistic objectivity. I don't think objectivity exists. You can do journalism in a very fair and fact-based way. You can go and seek the information and track down the sources and balance the information and try and give the fairest account that you can. But what you choose to cover, what you consider important, what you privilege, what you ignore, that is very much a function of your biases or the preferences of the population that you're serving. And so it can be very easy for that coverage to skew, not in terms of its factuality, but in terms of what it considers important. And I think that is what produces the sensation that the media has a liberal bias.

As always happens with our interviews, we are out of space here.  We talked more about how to create a compelling story to drive support for democracy, the role of journalism in crafting and spreading such messages, how journalists need to relate to, work with, or even in a sense, become "influencers," because those are the people who do actually have influence, and what the role of AI is in all of this. And more. It is a great discussion, so we hope you will read or watch it!

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Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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