The Climate Crisis as a Challenge to Democracy

This essay, a postscript to the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” analyzes the particular challenges that the climate emergency poses for representative democracy. It asks how ways of conducting political conflict can be shaped in a broadly speaking climate-friendly way. It also probes an institutional alternative to representative assemblies of winners in free and fair elections among political parties: mini-publics of citizens chosen at random. Some advantages of this alternative are identified, but doubt is cast on any attempt to have it replace elections and assemblies of professional politicians.