Democratic Faith

Introduction
Dynamics of Democratic Faith
For better or worse, democracy cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility.--Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life
DEMOCRACY IS REGNANT in practice and triumphant in theory. While many thinkers object to suppositions that we have reached philosophically the "end of history," nevertheless in Western political thought there is no formidable or even noticeably significant challenge to the near-universal embrace of democracy as the sole legitimate form of government.Particulars differ radically--sometimes it appears that various camps fight to assume the label "democratic" in order to assert their unimpeachable legitimacy and dismiss the claims of philosophical opponents, just as the term "antidemo-cratic" constitutes opprobrium of the highest order--yet, at base, an underlying embrace of certain democratic tenets centered around a belief in universal human suffrage, political equality, economic and personal liberty, and inherent human dignity constitute shared features of various schools of democratic thought. In political theory--a "field" invented some twenty-five hundred years ago in order to discern the relative virtues and deficiencies of different regime types, and often identifying democracy as inferior to monarchy and aristocracy--it is no longer necessary, by and large, for its contemporary practitioners to demonstrate the grounds for democracy's superiority.
Yet, at the risk of contrariness, if not outright overstatement, democratic theory is in a state of quiet crisis, reflecting (if inadequately) the more serious crisis of democracy itself. The quiescent assumption that democracy's superiority can and ought to be taken as a matter of unchallenged belief rests on a set of largely unexamined presuppositions that point to a quiet desperation underlying much of contemporary democratic theory--a desperation, indeed, that has always been present in democratic theory from its earliest articulations in antiquity. That desperation has been more evident in ages with high degrees of democratic suspicion, and has taken the form of forcefully articulated statements of democratic faith. In the absence of such widespread opposition in the contemporary era, such strong statements of democratic faith have become less evident within mainstream analyses of democracy, but even their pale counterparts evince no less anxiety--albeit less self-awareness of that anxiety--than their more explicit earlier counterparts. This desperation takes the form of an inherent fear that "faith" is not sufficient--that belief in democracy will not be repaid in reality--and thus that either democracy must give way to the reality of human shortcomings or human shortcomings must be overcome to realize democracy. While claiming to take "men as they are," democratic theory from its inception, even to its dominant contemporary expressions, exhibits anything but satisfaction for the civic capacities of ordinary humans, and seeks, sometimes to a major extent, to alter that condition for democratic ends.
In the first line of Rousseau's Social Contract, Rousseau declares his intention to "take men as they are" and the laws as they might be. A less utopian yet more idealistic formulation perhaps cannot be found in the history of political thought. Men, Rousseau suggests, are sufficiently capable as they are to create good laws--laws that could serve as the basis of an excellent regime, but which yet elude them. Such law might be realized if the inherent decency of humans could itself be either recovered or actualized for the first time. "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains": our freedom is inherent in our deepest origins but has been shackled by institutions and practices that deceive or divert men from their true condition. Rousseau formulates the modest yet radical premise of democracy: democracy is based upon a belief in human decency, even potential for individual and collective goodness, and needs only to achieve the realization of this inherent decency to bring about democracy in its most fully manifested, even ideal form. Democracy, in this succinct formulation, seems the most appropriate, even most natural regime for human beings. While reviled in past ages as according too great faith in human goodness--trusting otherwise selfish and self-involved humans to extend as much respect and consideration to the views, interests, and property of others as those that underlie one's own motivations--previous philosophers ranging from antiquity to the middle ages and even into modernity have held democracy to be an idealistic but finally unworkable form of utopian fantasy.