The "politics of the libertarian mob"

Thanks to Douglas Reid for passing along this excellent article by Mark Lilla that reflects on the current state of politics in America specifically, and in western democracies more generally.

Too multi-faceted to summarize here, it gets into the causes and implications of people's well-reported decline in trust for government and other collective institutions in society, and hints that our quest for ever-greater freedom may ultimately prove counterproductive. 

As Lilla writes, "Representative democracy is a tricky system; it must first give citizens voice as individuals, and then echo their collective voice back to them in policies they approve of. That is getting harder today because the mediating ideas and institutions we have traditionally relied on to make this work are collapsing."

I share his concerns.  They are in part why I hope that a look into the individuals whose, frankly, difficult job it is to link Lilla's "libertarian mob" to our public insitutions and to help formulate "their collective voice" might teach us something, and even point us toward some new ways of looking at these concerns.