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By Glenn W. Smith
"Democracy: a recognition of souls, all down the open road, and a great soul seen in its greatness, as it travels on foot among the rest, down the common way of living."
D.H. Lawrence
Political theorist Robert Dahl once noted that twenty-five centuries of debate about democracy had not "produced agreement on some of the most fundamental questions about" it. It turns out that Dahl, like many theorists and historians, wildly underestimated the duration of the discussion. It's more like 5,000 years, or even 10,000 years. But he was right about the confusion. And if we don't understand what democracy is, or what the human values are that inform it, how can we achieve its promise?
When we examine the health of our political practices, differing concepts of democracy lead to different conclusions. Advocates of classical democracy, better termed popular democracy, focus on political equality and believe democracy to be a system in which the wisdom of individual citizens, expressed directly by initiative or through the election of representatives from among their neighbors, should determine outcomes. Elite democrats believe that human nature is essentially competitive and hierarchical, that issues are too complex for most people's level of knowledge, and that democracy requires only that some of the people participate in election contests, choosing leaders from among more knowledgeable and naturally gifted and powerful elites.
For the advocates of popular democracy, low voter turnout and systematic corruption of election processes are disasters. Concern for the common interest and individual autonomy and responsibility are balanced. Most importantly, popular democrats believe support for representative government depends upon bonds of sympathy and understanding among citizens and between the chosen representatives and those represented.
For elite democrats, as long as some reasonably well-informed citizens participate, tyranny is somewhat inhibited by a latent threat of voter rebellion. Turnout levels matter little (as long as it's the right people who vote); corruption of election practices is often shrugged off as the unhappy but inevitable result of competitive human nature. Self-interest prevails, and a little democracy goes a long way. Important decisions are left to a knowledgeable elite, but the people are given at least a token opportunity to have their say.
There is also a critical asymmetry in the public descriptions of these two kinds of democracy. Elite democrats can and often do disguise elite rule in the language of the popular democrats. Even Mussolini called his fascist state a democracy. True popular democrats, however, can hardly deploy the language of hierarchically oriented elites in the promotion of political egalitarianism. Plato famously recommended that rulers employ a "noble lie," to convince the ruled that their unequal status was due to pre-determined divine ordinance. Similarly, modern elites justify their overblown paeans to popular democracy as noble lies or necessary fictions.
The Noble Truth of Human Empathy
If popular democracy depends upon authentic bonds of sympathy and trust among citizens, these bonds cannot be faked. It could be said that popular democracy depends essentially upon the noble truth of human empathy.
In his essay on Walt Whitman quoted in the epigraph above, D.H. Lawrence says democracy is a "recognition of souls" embarked upon a common journey along a never-ending "open road." By defining democracy within the metaphor of Life as a Journey, Lawrence gives us democracy as a process of becoming. Democracy is not a thing whose essence can be captured or contained. Democracy must be enacted, the way, say, two lovers daily enact a marriage. It's up to democratic citizens, every moment of their lives, to enact democratic bonds with one another. Lawrence also speaks of the emergence of "a great soul seen in all its greatness," implying that empathy or the recognition of souls allows for the temporary ascendancy of skilled leaders among an egalitarian people. This is an important point. Critics of popular democracy often accuse egalitarians of simply being anti-authority. To the contrary, the practices of popular democracy arose in recognition of the need for leadership, with appropriate checks and balances in place to make sure these leaders continue to travel "on foot among the rest," and not ride ahead upon noble lies or political steeds of their own invention.
Both popular and elite conceptions call upon a dominant Myth of Democratic Origins, which locates the embryonic democratic impulse among the pre-Classical Greeks and credits its blossoming to the rise of a decidedly unemotional, Western concept of Reason. We can't underestimate the power of origin myths, because the widely shared folk theory of essences tells us that essences are contained in origins. But this myth of origins has skewed our understanding of democracy's past as well as its potential. Among other faults, it confuses human emotion with unreason, and so it discounts the importance of empathy to democracy.
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