There are a lot of loose, baggy terms in American political discourse: “populism,” “liberalism,” “evangelical.” These words, applied with care, still have their uses. I’m not convinced the same is true of “democracy.” Maybe it’s still a noble word in some sense, but its repeated abuse over many decades has made it useless.
A democracy, when I was taught civics in the 1980s, was distinguishable from a republic. In a strict democracy, every citizen is asked to vote on every important public question. Should we raise taxes? Should we go to war with Carthage? Plebiscites on everything being impractical, the ancients invented republics, in which you vote for the people who make these decisions.
Asked what the Founders had accomplished at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin didn’t say “a democracy—if you can keep it.” Most of the Founders equated democracy with mob rule and wanted to avoid it. For a few, notably Thomas Jefferson, the word connoted self-government and decentralization of power. Andrew Jackson and his followers used it that way. Abraham Lincoln, who didn’t often use the word, treated democracy as a positive term signifying equality and self-rule.
With the rise of Progressivism at the turn of the 20th century, however, “democracy” took on meanings that had little to do with voting, elections, majorities and procedural freedoms. The activist and philosopher Jane Addams, in “Democracy and Social Ethics” (1902), defined democracy “not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith.” In “Democracy and Education” (1916), the theorist John Dewey observed that “a democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”
These and many similar claims suggest that for early-20th-century Progressives “democracy” meant more or less whatever political aims Progressives thought good and desirable.
Elsewhere in the world, the word “democratic” began attaching itself to distinctly undemocratic regimes and organizations. The Bolsheviks in Russia emerged from the Social Democratic Labor Party. Postwar Romania, in which dissent was outlawed, was run by the People’s Democratic Front. In the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, known in the West as North Vietnam, a favorable opinion of America or a desire to emigrate could get you and your family “re-educated” or murdered. In America, Students for a Democratic Society stood for an array of left-wing causes, but the right of people to vote against those causes didn’t compute. In the minds of SDS’s founders, its causes were democracy.
Plainly “democratic” was doing the work of legitimation. A democratic party or front or republic meant something everyone could favor, even if it might disappear its opponents from time to time. The term “democratic socialism,” widely used in Europe and North America since the middle of the last century, was meant to signify the sort of socialism that people voted for. It wasn’t imposed on an unwilling people, as in Soviet Russia, but embraced willingly.
The idealization of democracy took a break after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-91. Democracy, or “liberal democracy,” had won, and it was no longer necessary to defend it. That term “liberal democracy” denoted a loose collection of ideals including the rule of law, checks on government, personal autonomy, and a welfare state paid for by a robust market economy. You had the sense, though, in the ’90s and early 2000s, that the term’s most prolific users had begun to mean something else by it: Democracy was, for them, something closer to a technocracy—a system run by experts that maximizes equality. The franchise was important, sure, but the essential good of liberal democracy consisted in its social outcomes.
Democracy as an ideal roared back with Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Suddenly it was being attacked. “Democracy dies in darkness” became the Washington Post’s official slogan (the Post meant this as a warning, though a skeptical observer might ask if it was an aspiration). Commentators worried that democracy was imperiled, menaced, on the verge of demise. Innumerable books and essays theorized about “threats” to and “assaults” on democracy.
By now the term was a jumble. Commentators and politicos who worried that democracy was under threat seemed to hold the Deweyan view that democracy wasn’t so much a form of government as a means of expanding novel individual rights and generating other allegedly benign policy ends. At the same time they embraced an aggressive majoritarianism, demanding an end to the Electoral College and the filibuster and threatening to add states to the union and justices to the Supreme Court to achieve their goals.
The word has only grown looser and baggier in recent years. In Israel, we were told in 2023, the Netanyahu government was assaulting democracy by attempting to curtail the Supreme Court’s power arbitrarily to strike down laws passed by democratic majorities. In the U.S., the 2024 election will be, according to President Biden, about “democracy.” In a speech commemorating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in Valley Forge, Pa., Mr. Biden explained what he meant by the word.
“Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind,” he said, “to be who you are, to be who you want to be. Democracy is about being able to bring about peaceful change. Democracy—democracy is how we’ve opened the doors of opportunity wider and wider with each successive generation, notwithstanding our mistakes.”
For Mr. Biden and his sympathetic listeners, democracy means things that are good and not things that are bad.
The word “democracy” doesn’t appear in the Gettysburg Address, but that document contains the finest definition of the term, taking it in its general sense, ever enunciated. Lincoln expressed the hope “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Democracy, if it’s to mean anything, has to include all three of these components.
Government “of” the people: The people own the government and, acting collectively and according to rules, may shake it up and change its policies when they wish. Government “by” the people: Ordinary citizens staff it and guide its decisions. Government “for” the people: Its policies are meant to benefit the citizenry as a whole.
The trouble with progressive thought—both in the early-20th-century and the 21st-century senses of that term—and with the way progressives speak of “democracy,” is that they ignore the first two parts of Lincoln’s formulation and care only about the third. Government, in the progressive view, ought to benefit the people. But it has to resist their crazy impulses, and it’s necessarily composed of credentialed experts empowered to overrule the people when they act against their own interests.
Maybe the 2024 election is about democracy. If it is, it’s about nothing.
A democracy, when I was taught civics in the 1980s, was distinguishable from a republic. In a strict democracy, every citizen is asked to vote on every important public question. Should we raise taxes? Should we go to war with Carthage? Plebiscites on everything being impractical, the ancients invented republics, in which you vote for the people who make these decisions.
Asked what the Founders had accomplished at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin didn’t say “a democracy—if you can keep it.” Most of the Founders equated democracy with mob rule and wanted to avoid it. For a few, notably Thomas Jefferson, the word connoted self-government and decentralization of power. Andrew Jackson and his followers used it that way. Abraham Lincoln, who didn’t often use the word, treated democracy as a positive term signifying equality and self-rule.
With the rise of Progressivism at the turn of the 20th century, however, “democracy” took on meanings that had little to do with voting, elections, majorities and procedural freedoms. The activist and philosopher Jane Addams, in “Democracy and Social Ethics” (1902), defined democracy “not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith.” In “Democracy and Education” (1916), the theorist John Dewey observed that “a democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”
These and many similar claims suggest that for early-20th-century Progressives “democracy” meant more or less whatever political aims Progressives thought good and desirable.
Elsewhere in the world, the word “democratic” began attaching itself to distinctly undemocratic regimes and organizations. The Bolsheviks in Russia emerged from the Social Democratic Labor Party. Postwar Romania, in which dissent was outlawed, was run by the People’s Democratic Front. In the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, known in the West as North Vietnam, a favorable opinion of America or a desire to emigrate could get you and your family “re-educated” or murdered. In America, Students for a Democratic Society stood for an array of left-wing causes, but the right of people to vote against those causes didn’t compute. In the minds of SDS’s founders, its causes were democracy.
Plainly “democratic” was doing the work of legitimation. A democratic party or front or republic meant something everyone could favor, even if it might disappear its opponents from time to time. The term “democratic socialism,” widely used in Europe and North America since the middle of the last century, was meant to signify the sort of socialism that people voted for. It wasn’t imposed on an unwilling people, as in Soviet Russia, but embraced willingly.
The idealization of democracy took a break after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-91. Democracy, or “liberal democracy,” had won, and it was no longer necessary to defend it. That term “liberal democracy” denoted a loose collection of ideals including the rule of law, checks on government, personal autonomy, and a welfare state paid for by a robust market economy. You had the sense, though, in the ’90s and early 2000s, that the term’s most prolific users had begun to mean something else by it: Democracy was, for them, something closer to a technocracy—a system run by experts that maximizes equality. The franchise was important, sure, but the essential good of liberal democracy consisted in its social outcomes.
Democracy as an ideal roared back with Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Suddenly it was being attacked. “Democracy dies in darkness” became the Washington Post’s official slogan (the Post meant this as a warning, though a skeptical observer might ask if it was an aspiration). Commentators worried that democracy was imperiled, menaced, on the verge of demise. Innumerable books and essays theorized about “threats” to and “assaults” on democracy.
By now the term was a jumble. Commentators and politicos who worried that democracy was under threat seemed to hold the Deweyan view that democracy wasn’t so much a form of government as a means of expanding novel individual rights and generating other allegedly benign policy ends. At the same time they embraced an aggressive majoritarianism, demanding an end to the Electoral College and the filibuster and threatening to add states to the union and justices to the Supreme Court to achieve their goals.
The word has only grown looser and baggier in recent years. In Israel, we were told in 2023, the Netanyahu government was assaulting democracy by attempting to curtail the Supreme Court’s power arbitrarily to strike down laws passed by democratic majorities. In the U.S., the 2024 election will be, according to President Biden, about “democracy.” In a speech commemorating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in Valley Forge, Pa., Mr. Biden explained what he meant by the word.
“Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind,” he said, “to be who you are, to be who you want to be. Democracy is about being able to bring about peaceful change. Democracy—democracy is how we’ve opened the doors of opportunity wider and wider with each successive generation, notwithstanding our mistakes.”
For Mr. Biden and his sympathetic listeners, democracy means things that are good and not things that are bad.
The word “democracy” doesn’t appear in the Gettysburg Address, but that document contains the finest definition of the term, taking it in its general sense, ever enunciated. Lincoln expressed the hope “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Democracy, if it’s to mean anything, has to include all three of these components.
Government “of” the people: The people own the government and, acting collectively and according to rules, may shake it up and change its policies when they wish. Government “by” the people: Ordinary citizens staff it and guide its decisions. Government “for” the people: Its policies are meant to benefit the citizenry as a whole.
The trouble with progressive thought—both in the early-20th-century and the 21st-century senses of that term—and with the way progressives speak of “democracy,” is that they ignore the first two parts of Lincoln’s formulation and care only about the third. Government, in the progressive view, ought to benefit the people. But it has to resist their crazy impulses, and it’s necessarily composed of credentialed experts empowered to overrule the people when they act against their own interests.
Maybe the 2024 election is about democracy. If it is, it’s about nothing.
