CAN'T GET FROM A TO C IF YOU START AT B

Four books seek to rescue America's democratic experiment -- and unwittingly point up some of its limitations. (Kimberly Phillips-Fein, June 15, 2003, Washington Post)

When Woodrow Wilson rallied the United States to "make the world safe for democracy," his critics pointed out that a true democrat would not need to look a continent away. After all, America itself was only a partial democracy. Blacks in the South had less political freedom than Russians under the tsar; women could not vote; and coal miners, steel workers and immigrant seamstresses faced violent repression if they tried to organize unions. Yet for Wilson, an idealist elected on an antiwar platform (who also claimed the dubious distinction of bringing Jim Crow to Washington, D.C.), the fight for democracy was to be waged in the European trenches, not on battlefields closer to home.

Today, the idea of exporting democracy around the world is alive and well. But four new books by leading political thinkers revisit the difficulties that we've had here in the United States in achieving a truly democratic politics. Taken together, they paint a picture of American democracy threatened by market-induced inequality and the vicissitudes of the global economy as well as the more timeless menaces of demagoguery and tyrannical majorities. And each study, in a different way, shows that invoking democratic cliches is far easier than building a politics that genuinely reflects democratic principles -- a lesson that many of today's more cynical would-be exporters of our democratic ideal might well take to heart. [...]

Each of these books is skeptical about the future of American democracy, but all are ruminative, dreamy and wide-ranging, preferring a meditative to a combative tone. Each one holds out a promise of American democracy ample and hale, hovering either in the past or in the future. Yet despite their considerably varied subjects and method, these books also share one important flaw. None of their authors seems to consider democracy an idea and a practice with inherently political content. None of them takes seriously a singular truth: that throughout history, from the American Revolution to the French Revolution to the expansion of the suffrage throughout Europe to the inclusion of women in the polity, democracy has been won only through sustained, even at times revolutionary, conflict. Any expansion of democracy requires that powerful elites relinquish political control, giving it over to the people who are ruled. Democracy is not simply a question of participation in organized groups, competition between political parties, transparent international politics or virtuoso leadership. It is a political idea, and as such it demands that people mobilize in opposition to existing inequalities.

In the words of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, democracy is by its nature a "fighting faith." These four books, despite their strengths, miss this key dimension of democratic politics. And so in their efforts to analyze the anemia of American democracy, they inadvertently seem to mirror the political inertia they deplore.

America is, of course, quite intentionally designed to be only partially democratic, because Liberty is an end of our government, not democracy itself. And most of the steps taken to make it a "true" democracy have, predictably, tended to be destructive of that Liberty. So to speak of the American democratic experiment in the way Ms Phillips-Fein invokes the term here--particularly the equation of that experiment with expansive suffrage--is to begin the conversation with an oxymoron. No wonder it quickly goes astray in the authors' works. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 16, 2003 5:36 PM