A refrain that we often hear is along the lines of: most people are not motivated by appeals to save our democracy; the concept is too abstract; people are focused on bread-and-butter issues; maybe they can get exercised about the loss of this or that right, but not democracy in the abstract. With few exceptions, candidates from Right to Left appear to agree on this — at least they campaign so. I asked ChatGPT to identify campaign slogans in current races in which “democracy” was a term, and the pickings were slim: a half-dozen campaigns, all Democrats or Independents, out of just over 500 races (House, Senate, Governorships).

To some extent, I can understand this. Some of us (you know who you are) are deeply committed to our nation’s ideals, intently following their ebb and flow, and engaged in their promotion. The vast majority of us are not and do not. “No Kings!” protests are important, but they have yet to crack the 3.5% of the population that some theories suggest is needed for fundamental impact. And to be sure, there are alternative ways to motivate people that are democracy-dependent, so to speak, but more concrete and immediate than the advocating the idea as such.

That said, I think especially now we need to work to understand and promote the ideal of democracy– understand why it is a good thing. 

Moral philosophers — going back to Plato — sometimes distinguish three sorts of good: things good in themselves, like happiness and pleasure; things good as means to achieving other goods, like exercise and money; and goods that are both good in themselves and good as means, like understanding and health.

So, what sort of good is democracy? Well first, for sake of argument if nothing else, let’s agree that it is a good. Clearly, this is no longer a universally accepted view in this country, or elsewhere. Democracy – perhaps more common in human history than we often think – is at a low ebb. We can deal another time with the objections to it as such. But for now let’s agree that it is a good. 

To start, let’s ask if democracy is good as a means to other goods — goods like equality, our unalienable rights, our safety, our security. If the people are empowered to shape the government, at least in principle the government is not as likely to be commandeered for the personal gain of the ruler; not as likely to exploit the people; more likely to be attuned to the good of the people. We can appreciate this in part through a counter-example: that African Americans were, following the abandonment of Reconstruction, denied genuine democratic participation in the South and elsewhere, and suffered the ills of oppression and segregation, is a perverse testimony to the effects of a non-democratic, authoritarian form of government. That example also shows how easy it is for democracy to be lost to oligarchic or supremacist powers, even when those powers might be the “rest of us.”  Socrates makes a case in Plato’s Republic that democracy is inevitably one step away from tyranny, and the American founders were certainly keen to include numerous checks on pure democracy, to prevent it from descending into tyranny, as Plato argued it could. (A descent which we are dangerously close to witnessing today.) Democracy is a flawed and uncertain means — but surely when it is effectively implemented, it is a means to the goods listed above and more.

Could democracy also be good in itself? I think so. Democracy, properly practiced, is a form of government that involves a set of virtues that are worthwhile in themselves: social responsibility and responsiveness, concern, care, courage, attentiveness, civic-mindedness, and more. The very participation in democracy as a form of government compared to other forms is good in itself. It is government humanized. 

So, democracy is both good in itself and good as a means — and in a sense, it is good in itself provided its value comes in concert with its instrumental value of good as means. If democracy did not protect equality, freedom, and unalienable rights, it cannot be considered good in itself only. Indeed, achieving those ends is inextricably connected with the virtues of responsible democratic participation. Virtually by definition, if it is not also a means to the goods we noted above, it is not really democracy. (A related take on this — a discussion of liberalism — is discussed by Joey McFadden here.)

To some extent, the above discussion, in its abstraction, has illustrated the problem we started with. What do we even mean by terms like “democracy” — or “socialism” or “capitalism” or “republicanism,” for that matter? There are always textbook or dictionary definitions of such terms, but they are not very helpful. In actuality, governments, economies, societies are complicated processes of subordinate systems and orders, operating with many local and some overarching processes and rules of communication and translation. There is no clear line between a “democracy” and an “autocracy,” between “capitalism” and “socialism” such as the dictionary might imply. 

McFadden says of liberalism that it “is a habit not a principle,” and although I disagree a bit with his use of the term “principle,” we might say the same thing about democracy: it is a habit, a praxis. And when we look to the development of a habit, we often look for and speak in terms of controlling ideals, at least as a beginning for discourse and organization.  Today, to a large extent we as a society have lost — and in many cases have come actually to question — the guiding ideal of democracy. What can we do to resurrect a deeper understanding of it?

In some posts, I have referred to what I call Lincoln’s “formula” for democracy: the closing phrase of the Gettysburg Address, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” (here, for instance). What I would like to do is devote four posts to this formula, as a way of talking about the ideal of democracy. So please stay tuned.