Dominic Rushe - ‘People are finally talking about class’: Astra Taylor on US democracy, socialism and revolution
Astra Taylor hasn’t
always been interested in democracy. “There was this vagueness about the word
that just seemed to be not just corruptible but almost inherently corrupt,”
says the writer, film-maker and activist. “I was attracted to words like
liberation, emancipation, equality, revolution, socialism. Any other word would
get my pulse going more than democracy.” For her, democracy was a word imperial
America used to sell free markets and push its agenda.
Yet Taylor, a lifelong
activist, says that she also always felt there was “a contradiction” inherent
in democracy that puzzled her. For all the cynicism the word attracted, she
could see there was power in an idea meant to strengthen the people, a power
that she explores in her new documentary, What Is Democracy?, and her upcoming
book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone.
In the US, the
election of Donald Trump in 2016 sundered the body politic, while that same
year, the Brexit referendum split the UK. Trump has used his office to
undermine the media, the legal system, the electoral process itself and anyone
who questions his will – all while praising dictators and suggesting the US may
one day have “a president for life”.
Russia has shown how
foreign powers can use technology to hack democracy, the economic success of
China’s one-party capitalism has demonstrated a different model, and the
seemingly unstoppable rise of the 1% has laid bare how big money skews the
system. The D word really
started to grip Taylor while she was writing her previous book, The People’s
Platform, a critique of Silicon Valley’s self-interested “utopianism”,
published in 2014. “I wanted to look at what a ‘democratic internet’ would look
like,” she says. “Not an empty, Silicon Valley-type democracy, but a real one.”..
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