In present-day North Korea no democratic conversation takes place because people aren’t free to talk, yet we could well imagine a situation when this freedom is guaranteed – as it is in South Korea. In the present-day United States the democratic conversation is endangered by people’s inability to listen to and respect their political rivals, yet this can presumably still be fixed. By contrast, in the Roman Empire there was simply no way to conduct or sustain a democratic conversation, because the technological means to hold such a conversation did not exist.
