Democratic Thinking (Introduction)
Democratic thinking begins with the development of the democratic self.
A how-to manual on democratic thinking would be appealing to many of us. The manual could begin with a checklist of the key characteristics of democratic thinking. Readers could glance at the checklist, confirm that they are thinking like a proper citizen of the United States of America, the first modern democracy, and then say to themselves, “Yep, I am a good citizen.” Alas, it doesn’t work that way.
Before we even begin to discuss democratic thinking, we need a historical frame, a short historical survey. I hope that this survey will emphasize what the founders of our country knew and what it is easy for us to forget: Our democracy is an ongoing experiment. Any experiment is fragile, and it can fail. Here is the historical frame that will direct much of what will follow in this series:
· As is clear in The Federalist Papers, our founders had a dark view of humanity. They read history, primarily Roman history, and understood that humans are often corrupted by power and greed.
· To counter the dark side of human nature, they constructed a government with checks and balances, which is often referred to as “Madisonian Democracy.”
· The founders were also concerned about how a populist movement can transform good citizens into a violent mob.
· The checks and balances of Madisonian Democracy depend upon the historical development of norms for the institutions of government. The weakness of this approach is that institutions and their evolving norms, even when written into laws or our founding documents, depend upon individuals of good will.
· In Democratic Vistas (1871), written almost a century after our constitution was ratified, Walt Whitman wrote that we did not yet have a democracy. If we are to have a full democracy, Whitman wrote that we must develop individuals who are capable of fully participating in a democracy. Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, in my opinion, should be viewed as a supplement to our founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. It stresses the importance of developing good citizens to ensure the future of democracy.
· Whitman’s Democratic Vistas should be viewed as the coalescence of a long line of thought beginning with Montaigne and continuing through Emerson, Thoreau, and other American authors. It is a coalescence that draws from the past and also points to the future, anticipating thinkers like Kenneth Burke and Hannah Arendt.
As I wrote in an earlier post, we need to be concerned about preserving democracy in the short term, but we should not presume that a good outcome in the 2024 election and a peaceful transfer of power will be enough to preserve democracy in the long term.
My series on Trump’s Rhetoric and Divided America addressed preserving democracy in the short term. This series on Democratic Thinking will address preserving democracy in the long term.
The first step to promoting democratic thinking is the most difficult: The task of nurturing the kind of individual who understands democratic values and is capable of thinking apart from the mob. This is the kind of individual who can fully participate in democracy dialogue. This has been our greatest failure as a democracy. The Divided America series was an attempt to explain this failure. We need to do better.
When Whitman selected the title Democratic Vistas, he wanted to suggest that he was looking far into the future. If we are to achieve his vision of democracy, we must nurture and educate our citizens. This does not happen quickly. It is not an easy goal that is within our reach. We have much work ahead.
I will begin this series with essays on how key thinkers have described the democratic individual. As we will see, this is different than the isolated, self-reliant frontiersman. This is an individual who can nurture community and think apart from that community. This includes both connecting with a time and place and seeing the limitations of that perspective.
As the series progresses, I will discuss particular ways of thinking. This part of the series will seem to be more like a manual. As we begin, I want to emphasize that citizens who are filled with fear, resentment, and anger will find this kind of thinking difficult. If we despair, if we assume that they are beyond change, we are not acting like a democratic individual ourselves.
As I hope will become clear as the series develops, those of us who want to preserve democracy must begin with ourselves. We must embody the values of democracy and the habits of a democratic self. As we change, as we learn to become more democratic, we will change those around us. If we fail to do this, they will change us. We will become part of the mob.