Democracy: What?

Democracy is not just an ordinary word. It is the yardstick by which we measure our performance and that of other countries. It contains a description; it also contains a goal. We would do well to remember, however, that the Founding Fathers looked on “popular government” as anything but the best of all political forms. When the Americans rebelled against their English king, the absence of an aristocracy in the Colonies made a popular government practically unavoidable. Still Madison, for one, had serious misgivings about so dangerous a form of government. He knew the historical record, and knew that democratic regimes—in ancient Greece, in Renaissance Italy—had been turbulent, volatile, faction-ridden. The main question for him was how to counteract the manifest shortcomings of democracy.

That kind of political sobriety is far from our own attitude. To us, democracy’s potentiality for perfection seems near-divine. We have turned a descriptive term into an ideological vision by means of which we torture ourselves into a sense of systemic guilt, currently the most fashionable badge of political maturity.

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Gerhart Niemeyer

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Democracy is not just an ordinary word. It is the yardstick by which we measure our performance and that of other countries. It contains a description; it also contains a goal. We would do well to remember, however, that the Founding Fathers looked on “popular government” as anything but the best of all political forms. When the Americans rebelled against their English king, the absence of an aristocracy in the Colonies made a popular government practically unavoidable. Still Madison, for one, had serious misgivings about so dangerous a form of government. He knew the historical record, and knew that democratic regimes—in ancient Greece, in Renaissance Italy—had been turbulent, volatile, faction-ridden. The main question for him was how to counteract the manifest shortcomings of democracy.

That kind of political sobriety is far from our own attitude. To us, democracy’s potentiality for perfection seems near-divine. We have turned a descriptive term into an ideological vision by means of which we torture ourselves into a sense of systemic guilt, currently the most fashionable badge of political maturity.