Nathan Gardels > Quotes

“This is a situation fraught with risk. In the regions where it is more deeply rooted—the Americas and Europe—representative democracy is in crisis. At the core of this crisis is the widening gap between people’s aspirations and the capacity of political institutions to respond to the demands of society. It is one of the ironies of our age that this deficit of trust in political institutions coexists with the rise of citizens capable of making the choices that shape their lives and influence the future of their societies. To put it in a nutshell, our challenge is to bridge the gap between demos and res publica, between people and the institutions of public interest, reweaving the threads that may reconnect the political system with the demands of society.1”
― Nathan Gardels, Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (

“To take hold, any vision with a chance of enduring realization must give people and nations alike confidence that they are once again in charge of their destiny, that they have as fair a shot as anyone else in making something of their lives. The Nobel scientist Ilya Prigogine understood that the present doesn’t determine the future so much as our image of the future determines what we do in the present. Following this insight, to succeed at renovating our societies today, we must paint a convincing image of a future in which everyone has a place.1”
― Nathan Gardels, Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (

“The lesson here is that political and cultural logic, rooted in emotion, identity, and ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind, operates in a wholly different dimension than the rational and universalizing ethos of economics and technology. Far from moving forward in lock-step progress, when they meet, they clash.”
― Nathan Gardels, Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (

“When polarization confronts America’s Madisonian check-and-balance political system, the result is particularly devastating.”4 The result, Fukuyama concludes, is that the “decayed” American political system is “less and less able to represent majority interests but gives excessive representation to the views of interest groups and activist organizations that collectively do not add up to a sovereign American people.”
― Nathan Gardels, Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (

“In this book, we propose three ways to think about how to renovate democracy, the social contract, and global interconnectivity in order to take back control: • Empowering participation without populism by integrating social networks and direct democracy into the system through the establishment of new mediating institutions that complement representative government • Reconfiguring the social contract to protect workers instead of jobs while spreading the wealth of digital capitalism by providing all citizens not only with the skills of the future but also with an equity share in “owning the robots” • Harnessing globalization through “positive nationalism” at home, global cooperation where necessary, and partnership where interests converge to temper the strategic rivalry between China and the United States”
― Nathan Gardels, Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (

“The chief flaw of China’s system, of course, is closely linked to it strength: to prevent the consensus from fraying, it errs on the side of repressive order and control over freedom. The system is the opposite of the West’s, in which the flaw lies within the strength of diverse participation and competitive elections: a growing inability to forge a governing consensus out of the exploding cacophony of voices and interests. And, as we’ve seen in the United States on policies ranging from Obamacare to climate change, when all-out competitive partisanship destroys consensus among the body politic, the democratic transfer of power can mean a complete rupture of policies endorsed by most voters only four years earlier. Indeed, the key argument of those who supported the removal of term limits so President Xi can rule indefinitely is the continuity and predictability it will provide of sticking to the course.”
― Nathan Gardels, Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (

“In the West, the contest over contrasting visions of the future must be settled through the practices and institutions of democratic deliberation. If those institutional arrangements have decayed or become outmoded due to changes in society and technology, renovating them under the new conditions is the most pressing challenge from which all else follows. Simply returning “our” partisans to the halls of power only reproduces the problem.”
― Nathan Gardels, Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (

“This emergent world appears to us as a wholly unfamiliar rupture from patterns of the past that could frame a reassuring narrative going forward. Philosophers describe the new territory of the future as “plastic” or “liquid,” shapelessly shifting as each disruptive innovation or abandoned certitude washes away whatever fleeting sense of meaning was only just embraced. A kind of foreboding of the times that have not yet arrived, a wariness about what’s next, settles in. Novelists such as Jonathan Franzen see a “perpetual anxiety” gripping society.6 Similarly, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, citing Wordsworth, speaks of “a strangeness in my mind,” the sense that “I am not of this hour nor of this place.”7”
― Nathan Gardels, Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (

“Belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust,” political scientist Francis Fukuyama warns. “American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life.”1 And so it has. From a reading of history going back to ancient Rome, we know that this is the way republics unravel. That danger should be our uppermost concern today.”
― Nathan Gardels, Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (