David Runciman > Quotes

“This is the world in which everyone is sensitised to risk but indifferent to fate.”
― David Runciman

“Weak democracies are vulnerable to coup d’états because their institutions cannot absorb a frontal assault. Strong democracies are relatively immune to a frontal assault because their institutions are resilient. As a result, the assault on stable democracies comes from the sides. Some of it gets deflected into idle chatter – the constant talk of betrayal, failure and crisis that is the background noise of partisan politics. Some of it gets pushed under the surface and behind the scenes, where only the adults in the room can be sure what really took place, and even they don’t agree. These phenomena feed off each other. Idle talk about the end of democracy is excellent cover for incremental assaults on democracy to hide behind. Meanwhile, the incremental assaults help to feed the talk of failure, without anyone being sure.”
― David Runciman, How Democracy Ends

“Weak democracies are vulnerable to coup d’états because their institutions cannot absorb a frontal assault.”
― David Runciman, How Democracy Ends

“Dictators and tyrants are the ones who lead their people over a cliff.”
― David Runciman, Politics

“On the other hand, had Obama refused to permit Trump’s inauguration, on the grounds that he was still occupying the White House, or that he was planning to install Clinton there, then democracy in America would have been done for, at least for now.”
― David Runciman, How Democracy Ends

“Hyper-organised societies, where the social control exercised by the government extends into more and more areas of people's lives, might become places in which voters do not have the fatalistic attitude towards winning and losing required by democracy. Too much may be at stake for the politicians as well because when their power is so extensive it becomes ever more painful to give it up.”
― David Runciman, The History of Ideas: Equality, Justice and Revolution

“The illusion of the modern world and of modern citizens is that politics will go away if you don't pay attention to it, that if you as a modern citizen get on with your own business, then other people will get on with theirs and leave you alone. But they won't. If you don't do politics, someone else will do your politics for you. That's how the modern state works. Its power depends on you, but if you're not interested in it, it won't simply leave you alone. Its power will become arbitrary and coercive, (pp66)”
― David Runciman, Confronting Leviathan

“Nozick thinks the mistake utopians make is to assume that their idealised society will work for everyone. No matter how it works or who designs it, some people are bound to loathe it. Instead we should recognise that the best society would be one in which different human types can find their own way to live. Communism would only be utopia for the people who prefer things this way;for others it would be hell. The same is true for Gandhi's asceticism, for Emma Goldman's anarchism and even Ayn Rand's version of libertarianism, which trumpets the virtues of the free market. Nozick thinks a true utopia would need to have a room for all these things, and to allow them to be freely chosen by the different people who lived there.”
― David Runciman, How Democracy Ends

“Modern politikanın tehlikesi, istikrarın bilgi kopukluğu üretmesidir. Şiddetin en denge bozucu tehditlerinden korunan vatandaşlar, politikaya duydukları ilgiyi tamamen kaybederler. Politika, yaşamlarının geri planındaki bir gürültü halini alır. Ama şiddet asla tamamen ortadan kalkmaz. Gafletimizden yararlanarak bizim onlara verdiğimiz gücü kötüye kullanan hükümet birimlerine bir hak olarak verilirler. Bunu yaparlar, çünkü yapabilirler. O halde şiddet kontrolünün amaçlanmayan sonucu, şiddetin kontrolümüz dışına çıkmasına izin vermemizdir.”
― David Runciman

“Bad things happen in nice places, and nice things happen in bad places. But that doesn't mean the places themselves are hard to tell apart.”
― David Runciman, Politics