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By Root 1533 0

that leads me to suspect the “autonomy” of consumer choice. It is hard not to be skeptical when recalling the last line of Quiz Show, the film account of the game show scandals of the 1950s. Said a representative of the great plunderers of public trust in what at the time was an innocent television medium, “We’re not exactly hardened criminals here—we’re in show business!” Those who invest billions in advertising, promotion, packaging, and cultural warfare in the name of selling products that nobody can be said to “need” are hardly criminals either: but their kind of show business is directed precisely at liquidating anything that smacks remotely of consumer autonomy, let alone democratic liberty. Hucksterism and snake oil swindles are not what Jefferson had in mind when he envisioned an educated citizenry or a civic republic.

The push toward concentration in the infotainment telesector that is rooted in this show business mentality, which is a primary focus of Part I of this book, has accelerated since it was published in the summer of 1996, almost at the same moment that the Disney company acquired ABC. In the year since, a half dozen new major mergers and acquisitions have further narrowed ownership in this vital sector.10 Combined with a telecommunications bill that further deregulates the industry and removes traditional barriers preventing mergers between carriers, broadcasters, and cable operators as well as between local and long distance companies, this move toward concentration has had a potentially devastating effect on the variety and liberty of civic communication. In the nineteenth century, the great monopolies in oil, steel, coal, and the railways were finally dismantled by vigorous government anti-trust regulation. But Michael Eisner is no Rockefeller and Bill Gates is no Vanderbilt and Steven Spielberg is no Carnegie. Eisner, Gates, and Spielberg are far more powerful, for theirs is power not over oil, steel, and railroads—mere muscles of our modern industrial bodies—but over pictures, information, and ideas—the very sinews of our postmodern soul.

McWorld has virtues then, but they scarcely warrant permitting the market to become sovereign over politics, culture, and civil society. Jihad too has virtues which, I acknowledge, may be less than easily discernible in light of my harsh criticism of parochialism’s abuses. Nonetheless, as Robert Bellah and his colleagues demonstrate in their study of America’s yearning for community (Habits of the Heart), and as Michael Sandel shows with acute historical insight in his recent tribute to Democracy’s Discontents, the fractious, material forces of our time leave us seeking forms of communion and fraternity that ethnic, religious, and civic communities once gave us. The success of the Communitarian movement suggests how deep the yearning runs.

Yet though there is a deep human need for community, and though democracy itself flourishes most richly when it is founded on the consensual will of tightly knit communities (city states and rural republics are its natural ground), the conditions of community present democrats with a conundrum. For the great dilemma of community is that those forms of communal association that yield the highest degree of intimacy, membership, solidarity, and fraternity are those rooted in strong communal ties of the sort that arise out of blood, narrow belief, and hierarchy: the demonization of outsiders. By the same token, democratic communities—community in its only safe form—become increasingly less fraternal, solidaristic, and satisfying as they become more open, egalitarian, and voluntary. “Democratic community” is thus something of an oxymoron. Defined rigidly, above all by reference to their enemies, communities can fasten people together into a body that no one can tear asunder. Defined with imaginative artifice by achieved values, common work, and chosen ends, communities remain open and egalitarian but are often more fragile. The hope of civil society, which is the hope of this book, is that the love of liberty and the imperatives