Democracy!

So. Y’all know that I feel strongly about democracy, right? As we enter the last week of a presidential campaign cycle, the powerfulest scene and show of the Western World, the swordless (I hope) conflict, or good or ill humanity, I think it’s good to take a few minutes, as many of us as can, and think about democracy. Not the candidates—the choosing, not the chosen. I’d like to challenge you, Gentle Readers all, to take a few minutes to think about democracy itself. What moves you about it? What problems do you have with it? How strongly do you feel about it? Why? What do you think democracy is anyway?

To me (and I know I have said this before) democracy is an attempt to create a self-governing and democratic populace. A populace capable of governing itself with the participation of all. Individuals, all, doing their part as they judge, shouldering responsibility not just for themselves and their families but for the whole nation. A populace that respects everyone’s part in it, equal in law as we are in housing the Divine spark of humanity, different each to each and everything connected to everything. Ever changing, ever succeeding, ever coming short, ever aspiring to more. Democracy is in some way fundamentally about the shortcomings of itself, because democracy is about continually remaking itself and making itself new, creating in every generation a new and more democratic people. It isn’t about good government, or honesty and integrity, or sensible policies. It isn’t about universal healthcare or a minimum wage or GDP growth or maintaining the bridges and tunnels—unless we want it to be. Unless we choose to govern ourselves that way. That’s the beauty of it. That’s why I love it so desperately and why I am moved, sometimes to tears, by the simple act of casting a ballot, the least and easiest of the forms of democratic participation.

The problem with democracy (and again I am aware I have said this before) is how to keep participating when you lose. Democracy is tough when you are in the minority, whether it’s on policy or culture or what. At some point, everyone winds up looking at the country and saying to themselves People are dying because my candidate lost. Or if not dying (and it so often is dying) then suffering injustice, bodily harm, violations of various kinds. Elections have serious consequences, and we all, each of us as individuals, have to figure out how to live with those consequences and keep participating. It will be a stark problem next week when fifty million people will have voted for the losing candidate; it has been a stark problem before and will be again. It’s a problem that is without an answer, too—the problem is fundamental in self-government, so long as people continue to be different one to another (and may that never change). The only response to it that I can see is to love democracy more. To cling to it, as ever-failing and insufficient as it is, and to commit to more (ever more) active participation in it. To simultaneously raise our aspirations and lower our expectations. To shoulder responsibility for governing ourselves, and to shoulder responsibility for failing to govern ourselves, and to should responsibility for governing ourselves again.

This will be a trying few days, and may be very, very trying for some time after that. It is my hope that I find some comfort, during those trying days, in my passion for democracy itself. Maybe you can find similar comfort in your answers: what do you think democracy is all about?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.