Has Democracy Died?

Has Democracy Died? | Carl E. Olson | Catholic World Report

The author of After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy explains why he believes democracy is misunderstood, over-hyped, and underwhelming.

Chilton Williamson, Jr. is a prolific author of both fiction and non-fiction who has worked as an editor for St. Martin’s Press, National Review, and, since 1989, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published by the Rockford Institute. His most recent book is After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy (ISI, 2012), which John Willson, professor emeritus of history at Hillsdale College, describes as “the best book on democracy in the past hundred years.” Williamson’s novel Mexico Way, will be published in the spring of 2013 by Chronicles Press Books. Williamson recently granted an interview to Carl E. Olson, editor of Catholic World Report, about the nature, difficulties, myths, history, and future of democracy.

CWR: There is constant talk about “democracy,” to the point that most people assume there surely is a clear and common agreement about what that word means. But is there? Can we locate an adequate and widely accepted definition?

Williamson: There is no “adequate and widely accepted definition” of democracy, and hasn’t been for many, many decades—if, indeed, ever. The most common understanding, strikingly phrased by Abraham Lincoln, is that democracy is “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” “Democracy,” Chesterton said, “is the enthronement of the ordinary man. If it is not that, what is it?” (C.S. Lewis thought it reducible to the practice of voting.) Of course, government, in any but a tiny society, cannot in practice be run “by the people” (at best, it can be managed by representatives chosen by the people), while there is similarly no way to “enthrone” the ordinary man save in the most metaphorical way. Since 1789, “democracy” has meant simply what whoever employs the term—or the society he lives in—means by it. My own definition of modern democracy is “utopia”: a society that has achieved complete equality and justice and in which no man lacks for anything he wants, or decides he wants in future.

CWR: As you demonstrate, it wasn't that long ago that democracy was considered impractical if not impossible. What changed? How did democracy become such a central notion—or even sacred belief—in the West? Why are we so enamored with “Democracy”?

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Comments

[Ed Peters]

I need to read this.

I'm fine with democracy, btw, but then I live in an (as yet) essentially free nation, with high literacy rates (not sure about comprehension levels) with a functional mechanical and technological infrastructure, and plenty of room twixt me and my neighbors (foreign and domestic). Start taking away those things, and I'd be, I'm pretty sure, less and less interested in democracy per se, and more and more interested in watching out for me and mine. In the meantime, I am getting pretty tired of "democracy" being the label slapped on every goal that happens to be more or less good. Maybe "democracy" is as close as a secularized society (or at least a thoroughly secularized elite) can get to a 'spiritual' value.

[Mark Brumley]

A very important point regarding the cultural, even technological, underpinnings of democracy. There are reasons, apart from sheer bigotry and other forms of injustice, that "democracy" in ancient Athens amounted to oligarchy, with only 5 percent of the population "participating" in government. Hard as it is to have a genuinely democratic society today, how much harder it would have been in Pericles' Athens. That society was built on slavery, among other things. And how difficult it is to have truly democratic societies in many places in the world today--although in many cases this is a cultural, not a technological, issue. There is no substitute for civilization, when it comes to having a viable political community. And civilization entails things such as education and virtue, as well as a certain level of material prosperity and stability. It was, as Maritain points out in CHRISTIANITY AND DEMOCRACY, the Christian emphasis on the dignity of every human person, that provided the cultural foundation for the rise of a truly universal vision of democracy in the West. And it was, among other things, economic development, with the related technological developments of industrialization, that made the idea of genuine democracy feasible. The Marxists are not wholly wrong when they consist the material conditions of human existence as pertinent to the political order.