Democracy is on the Substack
CrowdSource 11.4.2024
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: an extra-long election special!
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Why Democracy?
In honor of this week’s general elections, we asked contributors, guests and friends of Wisdom of Crowds to send us a quote or passage that says something valuable about democracy. Some of the submissions are serious, others are funny, all are worth your time.
From La Resistencia, by Ernesto Sábato:
The only regime compatible with human dignity is democracy.
“This is easy. My favorite happened right on WoC.
, in response to some theory that Damir was spinning up, scornfully asked:
What do you mean by democracy? Voting?
From H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C major (1916):
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
From George Washington’s Farewell Address:
I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations.
Let me now take a more comprehensive view and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.
From Agonistics by Chantal Mouffe:
For the agonistic perspective, the central category of democratic politics is the category of the “adversary,” the opponent with whom one shares a common allegiance to the democratic principles of “liberty and equality for all,” while disagreeing about their interpretation. Adversaries fight against each other because they want their interpretation of the principles to become hegemonic, but they do not put into question the legitimacy of their opponent’s right to fight for the victory of their position. This confrontation between adversaries is what constitutes the “agonistic struggle” that is the very condition of a vibrant democracy.
From Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things:
Freedom requires
A torch more bright to light its fading fires;
Man must assert his native rights, must say
We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway;
Oppressive law no more shall power retain,
Peace, love, and concord, once shall rule again,
And heal the anguish of a suffering world;
Then, then shall things, which now confusedly hurled,
Seem Chaos, be resolved to order’s sway,
And errors night be turned to virtue’s day.
Phil Klay
From The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham:
Larry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world’s confusion, so wishful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful, and so cagey, so mean and so generous, which is the people of the United States.
From Niccolo Macchiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, Book 1, Chapter 3:
As is demonstrated by all those who discuss civic life — and every history is filled with such examples — it is necessary for anyone who organizes a republic and establishes laws in it to take for granted that all men are evil and that they will always act according to the wickedness of their nature whenever they have the opportunity, and when any wickedness remains hidden for a time, it arises from a hidden cause that is not recognized by those who lack experience of its contrary, but time, which people say is the father of every truth, will eventually uncover it.
From The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt:
What first undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. Where power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of examples that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss. Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.
From The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracy, by Vincent Ostrom:
How people conduct themselves as they directly relate to one another in the ordinary exigencies of life is much more fundamental to a democratic way of life than the principle of “one person, one vote, majority rule.” Person-to-person, citizen-to-citizen relationships are what life in democratic societies is all about. Democratic ways of life turn on self-organizing and self-governing capabilities rather than presuming that something called “the Government” governs.
From “The Dangers of Democratic Determinism,” by
:
The tide of “democracy” is not receding ... Without forgetting the importance of values, we need to be wary of a strategy that prioritizes “defending” them, as that approach will likely backfire. Beating people over the head with the idea that they are insufficiently virtuous can only cause resentment. Change may well come; if it does, it will be gradual.
From Democratic Vistas by Walt Whitman:
I say the mission of government, henceforth, in civilized lands, is not repression alone, and not authority alone, not even of law, nor by that favorite standard of the eminent writer, the rule of the best men, the born heroes and captains of the race, (as if such ever, or one time out of a hundred, get into the big places, elective or dynastic) — but higher than the highest arbitrary rule, to train communities through all their grades, beginning with individuals and ending there again, to rule themselves. What Christ appear’d for in the moral-spiritual field for human-kind, namely, that in respect to the absolute soul, there is in the possession of such by each single individual, something so transcendent, so incapable of gradations, (like life,) that, to that extent, it places all beings on a common level, utterly regardless of the distinctions of intellect, virtue, station, or any height or lowliness whatever — is tallied in like manner, in this other field, by democracy’s rule that men, the nation, as a common aggregate of living identities, affording in each a separate and complete subject for freedom, worldly thrift and happiness, and for a fair chance for growth, and for protection in citizenship, &c., must, to the political extent of the suffrage or vote, if no further, be placed, in each and in the whole, on one broad, primary, universal, common platform.
The purpose is not altogether direct; perhaps it is more indirect. For it is not that democracy is of exhaustive account, in itself. Perhaps, indeed, it is, (like Nature,) of no account in itself. It is that, as we see, it is the best, perhaps only, fit and full means, formulater, general caller-forth, trainer, for the million, not for grand material personalities only, but for immortal souls. To be a voter with the rest is not so much; and this, like every institute, will have its imperfections. But to become an enfranchised man, and now, impediments removed, to stand and start without humiliation, and equal with the rest; to commence, or have the road clear'd to commence, the grand experiment of development, whose end, (perhaps requiring several generations,) may be the forming of a full-grown man or woman — that is something.
From “Equality,” an article by C.S. Lewis that appeared in the Spectator, August 27, 1943:
I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure …
C. S. Lewis elsewhere:
I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall and therefore think men are too wicked to be trusted with more than the minimum power over other men.
From the famous speech by Argentine president Raúl Alfonsín, which put an end to seven years of military dictatorship:
… In short, to live better; because, as we have said many times from the political rostrum, we Argentines have learned, in the light of the tragic experiences of recent years, that democracy is an even higher value than that of a mere form of legitimizing power, because with democracy one not only votes, but also eats. One is educated and healed.
From a speech by Frederick Douglas:
A man’s rights rest in three boxes. The ballot box, jury box and the cartridge box. Let no man be kept from the ballot box because of his color. Let no woman be kept from the ballot box because of her sex.
From Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert D. Putnam:
Voting is by a substantial margin the most common form of political activity, and it embodies the most fundamental democratic principle of equality. Not to vote is to withdraw from the political community. Moreover, like the canary in the mining pit, voting is an instructive proxy measure of broader social change. Compared to demographically matched nonvoters, voters are more likely to be interested in politics, to give to charity, to volunteer, to serve on juries, to attend community school board meetings, to participate in public demonstrations, and to cooperate with their fellow citizens on community affairs. It is sometimes hard to tell whether voting causes community engagement or vice versa, although some recent evidence suggest that the act of voting itself encourages volunteering and other forms of good citizenship. So it is hardly a small matter for American democracy when voting rates decline by 25 percent or more.
Otto von Bismarck:
People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.
From Gustave Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education:
Frederick, in order to mortify him, gave him to understand that he was himself a candidate for office, and once he’d made sure that his future colleague had his sights on the provinces, the showman declared he was at his service to take him round the electioneering clubs.
They visited them all or nearly all, the red and the true blue, the fanatical and the sedate, the puritanical and the raffish, the mystical and the boozy, the ones who had voted for the death of kings and those denouncing the profiteering grocery stores, and, in all of them, tenants cursing the landlords, worker-smocks full of spite for the frock-coats, and the rich conspiring against the poor. Many wanted compensation on the ground that they had formerly been martyrs of the police, others were begging for money to finance inventions; or else there were plans to set up Fouerist communes, projects for district department stores, schemes to provide universal happiness. Now and again a flash of intelligence lit up this fog of stupidity or there’d be a sudden burst of mud-slinging, a point of law summed up in an oath, flowers of rhetoric on the lips of some solider-boy, with a shoulder-belt strapped over his bare, shirtless chest. Sometimes, too, a gentleman made his appearance, an aristocrat speaking deferentially of working-class concerns; he’d not washed his hands, so that they’d look like the hands of a manual laborer. Some patriot recognized him, righteous members of the club would catcall him and he’d leave, going off with rage in his soul. To be accepted, it was desirable to always be speaking disparagingly of lawyers, trotting out expressions like “grist to the mill, “social problems,” and “workshops” as often as possible.
From Aristotle’s Politics:
The devices by which oligarchies deceive the people are five in number: by voting in assemblies, the bureaucracy, the law courts, by heavy weaponry, and by athletics. … In some states all citizen who have registered themselves are allowed to attend the assembly and to vote for causes, but if after registration they do not attend either in the assembly or at the courts, heavy fines are imposed upon them. The intention is that through fear of the fines they may avoid registering themselves, and then they cannot sit in the law-courts or in the voting assembly. . . .
These are the devices of oligarchical legislators, and in democracies they have counter devices. They pay the poor for attending the voting assemblies and the law-courts, and they inflict no penalty on the rich for non-attendance. It is obvious, then, that he who would make a mixture of these principles with justice should combine the practice of both, and provide that the poor should be paid to attend, and the rich fined if they do not attend, for then all will take part; if there is no such combination, power will be in the hands of one class alone.
Evelyn Waugh’s contribution to an election symposium in 1959:
I hope to see the Conservative Party return with a substantial majority. I have bitter memories of the Attlee-Cripps regime when the kingdom seemed to be under enemy occupation. I recognize that individually some of the Liberal candidates are more worthy than many of the Conservatives, but any advantage to them can only produce deplorable instability. I have met, seen or heard very few leading politicians; of those I know the Conservatives seem altogether more competent than their opponents.
I have never voted in a parliamentary election. I shall not vote this year. I shall never vote unless a moral or religious issue is involved (e.g., the suppression of Catholic schools). Great Britain is not a democracy. All authority emanates from the Crown. Judges, Anglican bishops, soldiers, sailors, ambassadors, the Poet Laureate, the postman and especially Ministers exist by the royal will. In the last three hundred years, particularly in the last hundred, the Crown has adopted what seems to me a very hazardous process of choosing advisers; popular election. Many great evils have resulted, but the expectation of a change of method in my lifetime is pure fantasy.
Crowned heads proverbially lie uneasy. By usurping sovereignty the peoples of many civilized nations have incurred a restless and frustrated sense of responsibility which interferes with their proper work of earning their livings and educating their children. If I voted for the Conservative Party and they were elected, I should feel that I was morally inculpated in their follies — such as their choice of Regius professors; if they failed, I should have made submission to Socialist oppression by admitting the validity of popular election. I do not aspire to advise my Sovereign in her choice of servants.
From the Crowd
In an open thread, we asked the Crowd to give us their reasons for supporting democracy, and whether they are proud to vote.
… it does annoy me that at the sub-national level I live in a one-party state that purports to be democratic. I’m not sure whom I’m annoyed at, though. I guess I don’t mind living under the rule of a party machine, but it’s demeaning to vote for it. So I choose the opposition reflexively, without bothering to learn what it stands for. … There’s a character in a Naipaul novel who speaks of having had “drinker’s pride” in his youth. Being proud to vote seems a little like being proud of having downed six shots. Good job.
I believe in democracy, un-ironically proud to vote, and yes I’m voting Tuesday! I’ve become an Election Day person, I just like the vibe. I don’t think I have any interesting story worth putting me in the post. I worked a polling place once in the before times in downtown Madison, WI (so you can picture it). Now I’m just a dad of toddlers who can walk less than a block to a church with the same poll workers and all my neighbors, and hopefully bring the kids since it’s on the way to the school that we can also walk to. Am I frustrated all the time with this country? Of course. But this is what we’ve got.
I believe in democracy because I don’t trust people with power to use it wisely unless they’re accountable to the people they’re meant to serve. It starts with my visceral hatred of monarchy (being born to the right parents should not give you an automatic right to rule!), and expands to my understanding that any human being can become a tyrant if they are not constrained by others. The more constrainers there are, the less dependent we are on the ostensible virtue of a few people close to the ruler to keep that ruler honest. …
What would be ironic about being proud to vote? Irony and voting don’t exist in the same space. Yes, I will be voting on Tuesday because I have common sense and I will feel pride because I have basic civic pride and also I am aware so I understand self-rule, to the extent it gets to exist anywhere, should not be taken for granted.
See you next week!
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