The Glory of Democracy
David Brooks / New York Times | 14 December 2017
In
1989, the Berlin Wall fell and Communism fell with it. Liberal
democracy seemed triumphant. Democracies sprouted in Central Europe.
Apartheid fell in South Africa. The Oslo process seemed to herald peace
in the Middle East.
Then
it all went bad. Tribalism and authoritarianism are now on the march
while the number of democracies declines. Far worse has been the
degradation of democracies, especially in our own country. The Congress
barely functions. We have a president who ignores facts and violates
basic decency. On college campuses, according to a Brookings/UCLA survey,
50 percent of students believe that “offensive” speech should be
shouted down and 20 percent believe it should be violently crushed.
In
short, we used to have a certain framework of decency within which we
held our debates, and somehow we’ve lost our framework. We took our
liberal democratic values for granted for so long, we’ve forgotten how
to defend them. We have become democrats by habit and no longer defend
our system with a fervent faith.
So
over the next few months I’m going to use this column, from time to
time, to go back to first principles, to go over the canon of liberal
democracy — the thinkers who explained our system and why it is great.
I’m going to start with Thomas Mann’s “The Coming Victory of Democracy.”
Mann, possibly the greatest novelist of his era, fled the Nazis and
came to America. In 1938, he gave a series of lectures against fascism,
Communism and the America Firsters.
Democracy
begins with one great truth, he argued: the infinite dignity of
individual men and women. Man is made in God’s image. Unlike other
animals, humans are morally responsible. Yes, humans do beastly things —
Mann had just escaped the Nazis — but humans are the only creatures who
can understand and seek justice, freedom and truth. This trinity “is a
complex of an indivisible kind, freighted with spirituality and
elementary dynamic force.”
“Man
is nature’s fall from grace, only it is not a fall, but just as
positively an elevation as conscience is higher than innocence,” he
writes. Original sin “is the deep feeling of man as a spiritual being
for his natural infirmities and limitations, above which he raises
himself through spirit.”
Democracy,
Mann continues, is the only system built on respect for the infinite
dignity of each individual man and woman, on each person’s moral
striving for freedom, justice and truth. It would be a great error to
think of and teach democracy as a procedural or political system, or as
the principle of majority rule.
It
is a “spiritual and moral possession.” It is not just rules; it is a
way of life. It encourages everybody to make the best of their
capacities — holds that we have a moral responsibility to do so. It
encourages the artist to seek beauty, the neighbor to seek community,
the psychologist to seek perception, the scientist to seek truth.
Monarchies
produce great paintings, but democracy teaches citizens to put their
art into action, to take their creative impulses and build a world
around them. “Democracy is thought; but it is thought related to life
and action.” Democratic citizens are not just dreaming; they are
thinkers who sit on the town council. He quotes the philosopher
Bergson’s dictum: “Act as men of thought, think as men of action.”
In
his day, as in ours, democracy had enemies and the prospects could look
grim. Mann argued that the enemies of democracy aren’t just fascists
with guns. They are anybody who willfully degrades the public square —
the propagandists and demagogues. “They despise the masses … while they
make themselves the mouthpiece of vulgar opinion.” They offer bread and
circuses, tweets and insults, but have nothing but a “rabbit horizon” —
all they see is the grubby striving for money and power and attention.
The
authoritarians and the demagogues subjugate action through bullying and
they subjugate thought by arousing mob psychology. “This is the
contempt of pure reason, the denial and violation of truth in favor of
power and the interests of the state, the appeal to the lower instincts,
to so-called ‘feeling,’ the release of stupidity and evil from the
discipline of reason and intelligence.”
They
possess the “kind of contempt which strives with all its might to
degrade and corrupt humanity in order to force the people to do its
will.”
Mann
has confidence in democracy’s ultimate victory because he has
confidence in democracy’s ability to renew itself, to “put aside the
habit of taking itself for granted.”
Renewal
means reform. He calls for economic and political reform that, quoting a
French deputy, “will create a true hierarchy of values, put money in
the service of production, production in the service of humanity, and
humanity itself in the service of an ideal which gives meaning to life.”
Mann’s
great contribution is to remind us that democracy is not just about
politics; it’s about the individual’s daily struggle to be better and
nobler and to resist the cheap and the superficial. Democrats like Mann
hold up a lofty image of human flourishing. They inspire a great
yearning to live up to it.
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