From its earliest days to the present, democracy has always been attended by a certain myth: citizens gather around in the community meeting-house, they have an open and rational discussion, they come to a consensus or hold a pleasant vote, decisions get made, and everyone becomes a better person in the process. This powerful legitimating myth is called deliberative democracy, and it is almost unrelated to the reality of democracy in any time or place. (...) The reality is different. Listen to real people argue about politics, and you will generally hear them recite arguments that they got from professional opinion-makers (politicians, pundits, journalists, scholars, workplace authorities, and so on) that they happen to agree with (Tarde 1969 [1898]: 312, cited in Schudson 1997a: 304-305). From the point of view of the deliberative democracy model, this observation is an embarrassment, if not an elitist insult. But it is nothing of the sort. Coming up with novel political arguments requires a lot of work. Human beings are finite, and nobody has the time or knowledge to invent thought-out arguments on every issue all by themselves. Even the professional arguers are mostly pooling arguments among themselves, for example by refashioning arguments they have appropriated from others and applying general schemata to particular cases.
"The Practical Republic: Social Skills and the Progress of Citizenship ".
https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/republic.html (August 29, 2006, 8:48:00 PM UTC).
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