Is Democracy "Beautiful"?

Our political preferences are largely a product of moral intuitions and aesthetic sensibilities that are difficult to account for.

“Is democracy beautiful?” I was asked to answer this question on a panel as part of a conference on beauty, of all things. The question initially struck me as odd. Plus, I didn’t really have an answer, a predicament that’s dogged me in recent months.

As I’ve gotten older (or less young), I’ve begun to think that most of our opinions are contingent and provisional. In other words, they’re accidents of history and context. They could’ve been otherwise. If you took my same genetic material but put me in, say, Wyoming (or Pakistan) or if I had different friends or went to a different school and was influenced by a different seventh grade history teacher, I would have probably ended up having different opinions than the ones I have today. Also: events. If 9/11 had never happened, I would have been the same person but different.

What we do have—and what is more unchanging—is a set of moral intuitions and aesthetic sensibilities. These are outside of politics or perhaps even pre-political. They are visceral, and things viscerally felt aren’t always easy to explain. They are there, and they might feel like they’ve always been. (This is more or less how I make sense of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “visceral” if rather inchoate Islamism).

Now that I was prompted with the question of “Is Democracy Beautiful?”, I felt pressure to fashion an opinion out of nothingness.

A Pundit Loses His Head

Sadly, I had written a book on democracy which didn’t include the word “beautiful” even once. So, instead, I searched for the word beautiful in my Twitter archives, which double as a daily political diary of unformed ideas, instincts, and occasionally “irritable mental gestures that resemble ideas,” to quote Lionel Trilling. There was only one reference to democracy being beautiful, but it was a good one.

After Biden took office on January 20, 2021, The New York Times announced in big, bold letters that ‘Democracy has prevailed,’ which was a quote from Biden during his inaugural address. Moved by the moment, I tweeted: “Alternation of power is a beautiful thing.”

So democracy was beautiful!

Before I headed to the conference, I thought about my own thoughts on beauty. I looked around. My apartment faithfully represents the key tenets of minimalist design, all clean lines, right angles, and stark contrasts. My book outlined a theory of something I called “democratic minimalism.” Was that a coincidence? Even the cover was an unusually stark example of Swiss minimalist design principles.

In a sense, democracy is simple, straightforward, and precise. It entails clear mechanisms for rotating power through periodic elections. But what democracy makes possible, and what it enables, is anything but “simple.” It allows and even generates conflict. It means coming to terms with uncertainty. It requires learning to let go (after you lose an election, as you inevitably will).

The Case Against Consensus

On the panel, which you can watch in full here, another speaker characterized American democracy as featuring quite a bit of “ugliness.” For her, the beauty of democracy was in its (largely unrealized) possibilities—the promise of a people coming together as one, or harmony. But, for me, there was beauty in dissonance. And I wondered again if this was somehow emblematic of my aesthetic sensibilities.

There is no accounting for taste. Or was there? Were all these things connected somehow? My favorite genre of music happens to be “shoegaze,” which involves distorted, reverb-heavy pillows of guitar coupled with ethereal, often female vocals buried relatively low in the mix, so that the voice itself becomes a co-equal instrument. Through dissonance and contrast, it coalesces into something that sounds sent down from the heavens, if you’ll indulge the slight hyperbole. (Visit and enjoy my “Shoegaze for Beginners” Spotify playlist here).

My taste in movies leans toward sprawling, self-combusting epics like Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret,”Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” Joachim Trier’s “Reprise” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s occasionally maligned “Magnolia.” They are great not in spite of their messiness but because of it.

But, as

Damir Marusic

might say, these are all digressions that distract from the heart of the matter. I am a believer, and beauty comes from belief and not just vague aesthetic sensibility. Democracy, as system of government with particular attributes, is more in keeping with the fundamentals of human nature. Who meant us to be this way and how did this nature come to be? As a natural law theorist might put it, these intuitions and dispositions are inscribed in our hearts by the who fashioned us into life. To put it differently, if beauty is in the divine, then there is beauty is being closer to who we were meant to be.

But this belief in the divine is itself contingent. It’s a belief that was forged through innate disposition and the context in which that disposition was realized. It could have been otherwise. Which is fine. After all, we’ve known for a long time that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Apparently so too is democracy.

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