Dissent Is the Health of the Democratic State — Crooked Timber

Dissent Is the Health of the Democratic State — Crooked Timber: This is where democracy comes in. It has priority, not as a first-order institution for getting everything done, but as a second-order institution for checking on and revising other institutions. No other organizational form is as well-suited to checking whether an institution is actively working; some (e.g., markets and courts) are positively pessimized for monitoring their own performance. Democracy has, importantly, two crucial parts: voting, or some similar means of aggregating choices, and debate, the arguments which come before and continue after every vote. Democratic voting is a way of making choices. Democratic debate is a tool for cognition, for harnessing the dispersed knowledge of the citizens and their diversity of perspectives and insights.