Democracy Matters (9 page)

The black community is increasingly divided, the upper and middle classes as against the feeble institutions of the inner cities. Too much of the black political leadership has become caught up in the mainstream political game and has been turning away from the
deep commitment to a more profound advocacy for poor blacks. Meanwhile a generation of blacks who have suffered from the cataclysmic breakdown of the civic and social structure in the inner cities are consigned to lives of extreme alienation and empty pursuit of short-term gratifications.

The emptiness of our political culture has also driven a surge of civically engaged religiosity in the form of the rise of the religious Right, with its misguided righteousness and its narrow, exclusionary, and punitive perspective on the country’s social ills. The impulse to join in this massively energized movement may well come from the desire to rise above the emptiness of what strikes its followers as a depraved culture that has lost its moral rudder, but the movement is violating the very ethics of compassion and ecumenicalism that it professes to live by. So zealous has this movement become that it has turned into a hugely divisive and antidemocratic force in the country.

As we take a hard look at our democracy, therefore, the resurgent imperialism of the Bush administration must not set the limits of our critique; repudiating the Bush administration is not enough. Turning back to multilateralism, and to tax and social policies that no longer grossly favor the already well off, are essential missions, but we should take this challenging moment as an opportunity for a deeper soul-searching. Our democracy is suffering from more serious psycho-social ills. This is where what I call the deep democratic tradition becomes so vital.

The dissonance of being both a person who ardently believes in democratic ideals—how can we not fall in love with them if and when we are exposed to them?—and a wide—eyed realist about the
dispiriting truths of everyday life in America can be alternately enraging, numbing, and crushing. But that dissonance has also provoked our most impassioned and profound indictments of America’s democratic failures, from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s championing of the necessity of self-cultivation and his praise of John Brown’s radical abolitionism, to Herman Melville’s darkly tragic portrayal of Ahab’s crazed imperialistic nihilism, to Mark Twain’s sly indictment of white supremacy, to James Baldwin’s and Toni Morrison’s profound explorations of the psychic scars of racism, and to Tupac Shakur’s eloquent outrage. The violence-obsessed and greed-driven elements of American culture project themselves out to the world so powerfully—and offensively—that the world has developed a problematic love-hate relationship with America, the ugly extremes of which we are now forced to confront. But legions of Americans have been equally affronted by the perversion of our democratic ideals.

This democratic vigilance has been disproportionately expressed by artists, activists, and intellectuals in American life. They have and can play a unique role in highlighting the possibilities and difficulties of democratic individuality, democratic community, and democratic society in America. They have been the primary agents of our deep democratic tradition. The penetrating visions and inspiring truth telling of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Eugene O’Neill, of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, John Coltrane, Lorraine Hansberry, and Toni Morrison, exemplify the profound potential of democracy in America.

These are the figures whose ferocious moral vision and fervent democratic commitment have held the feet of the plutocratic and
imperial elites to the fire and instilled a sense of purpose to democratic activism on the part of citizens from all colors and classes. They have been the life force behind the deeper individual and civic American commitment to democracy.

The deep democratic tradition did not begin in America and we have no monopoly on its promise. But it is here where the seeds of democracy have taken deepest root and sprouted most robustly. The first grand democratic experiment in Athens was driven by a movement of the demos—citizen-peasants—organizing to make the Greek oligarchs who were abusing their power accountable. Democracy is always a movement of an energized public to make elites responsible—it is at its core and most basic foundation the taking back of one’s powers in the face of the misuse of elite power. In this sense, democracy is more a verb than a noun—it is more a dynamic striving and collective movement than a static order or stationary status quo. Democracy is not just a system of governance, as we tend to think of it, but a cultural way of being. This is where the voices of our great democratic truth tellers come in.

The two paradigmatic figures of the deep democratic tradition in America are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville, two democratically charged giants who set in motion distinctive streams of this tradition. And the most Emersonian of American democratic intellectuals is James Baldwin, while the most Melvillean of our democratic intellectuals is Toni Morrison.

The indisputable godfather of the deep democratic tradition in America is Emerson, a literary artist of dramatic and visionary eloquence and the first full-blown democratic intellectual in the United States. Emerson was an intellectual who hungered most of
all to communicate to broad publics. He reveled in the burning social issues of his day (the annihilation of Native Americans, slavery), highlighting the need for democratic individuals to be nonconformist, courageous, and true to themselves. He believed that within the limited framework of freedom in our lives, individuals can and must create their own democratic individuality. He understood that democracy is not only about the workings of the political system but more profoundly about individuals being empowered and enlightened (and suspicious of authorities) in order to help create and sustain a genuine democratic community, a type of society that was unprecedented in human history. And he knew that mission required questioning prevailing dogmas as well as our own individual beliefs and biases. A democratic public must continuously create new attitudes, new vocabularies, new outlooks, and new visions—all undergirded by individual commitment to scrutiny and volition. He refused to accept the conventional wisdom of leaders and the narrow pronouncements of experts. In his famous essay “Self-Reliance,” he writes:

And also:

Emerson offered the empowering insight that to be a democratic individual is to be flexible and fluid, revisionary and reformational in one’s dealings with fellow citizens and the world, not adhering to comfortable dogmas or rigid party lines. He posits that the core of being a democrat is to think for one’s self, judge for one’s self, trust one’s self, rely on one’s self, and be serene in one’s own skin—without being self-indulgent, narcissistic, or self-pitying. This was not a standard beyond the enactment of everyday people, and the concerns of everyday people were the proper focus of democratic inquiry. In “The American Scholar,” Emerson declares:

Emerson’s democratic individual is a freedom fighter against those obstacles that stand in the way of a rich individuality, especially weighty dogma, crusty custom, and suffocating prejudice. The dominant American ideal of individual upward mobility was espoused by Herbert Hoover:

Yet this is but a portion of Emerson’s ideal of deep democratic individuality. He indeed applauds equality of opportunity, but he criticizes the narrow American dream of material prosperity as a form of conformism and sleepwalking that overlooks more fundamental goods like character and virtue. He notes:

In fact, in a low moment, Emerson quipped that “my quarrel with America, of course, was that the geography is sublime, but the men are not.” He saw the country as infected with pervasive “selfishness, fraud and conspiracy.” He mourned “the American people just as they are, with their vast material interests, materialized intellect and low morals” regulated by a capitalist “system of selfishness…of distrust, of concealment, of superior keenness, not of giving but of taking advantage.” He darkly concluded that “we are a puny and feeble folk.” Yet, though the nightside of America depressed
him, he never lost his democratic hope. Although he and America might be “defeated everyday,” Americans, he wrote, were “born to victory.” This struggle was intensified in his famous efforts to oppose the “removal” of the Cherokee from Georgia in 1835 and to contest the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In his public praise of John Brown after the raid on Harpers Ferry and in his celebration of the emancipation of slaves in the West Indies (when he shared the platform with the great Frederick Douglass), Emerson demonstrated a sincere, yet cautious, commitment to activism.

Emerson devoted his life to inspiring the public with his vision of the powers of self-enrichment that our democracy offers and moving them to engage with the issues of the day. He crafted a soaring and emotionally powerful rhetoric that made him the most popular speaker of his time. He believed deeply in the need for democratic intellectuals to exercise powers of persuasion, to take back the public’s attention from superficial and unfulfilling diversions, and to hold our public officials to a higher standard. To do just that, he trained his artistic voice to sing in order to spark courage, confidence, and comfort in our perennial struggles to become who we are and what America can be. His inspirations in this regard were the Roman public figures Quintilian and Cicero, who put forth seminal arguments about the powers and the mandates of public rhetoric in terms of keeping a government and society honest and inspiring the public to be engaged.

As the linguist George Lakoff has argued, the imperialist right wing in America today has crafted a conservative rhetoric that has had a seductive effect on the American public, and progressive democrats must come swinging back with a much more persuasive and
inspiring rhetoric that speaks to the democratic issues of equality of opportunity, service to the poor, and a focus on public interest.

Emerson took that rhetorical mission seriously, writing prose songs that were meant to unsettle the public, to jolt us out of our sleepwalking and inspire us to stay the democratic course. For Emerson, to be a democratic individual is to speak out on uncomfortable truths; to be an active player in public discourse is to be thrown into life’s contingency and fragility with the heavy baggage of history and tradition, baggage like the American legacies of race and empire.

And he put his philosophy of how to be a deep democrat into practice. He left his Unitarian ministry and pastorate because of his disagreement over doctrine. He refused to serve communion due to his iconoclastic beliefs. He then literally became a kind of secular intellectual minister who traveled throughout the country (he gave more than sixty lectures in a year at the age of sixty-two—with no airplanes or air-conditioned hotels!), speaking at lyceums, theaters, forums, or community centers. For over thirty years, Emerson spoke to his fellow citizens in their towns and cities about literature, history, manners, politics, and other sundry topics—face-to-face and soul-to-soul. He was banned from Harvard—his alma mater—for nearly thirty years after his infamous lecture at the divinity school in 1838 that questioned the divinity of Jesus. In that penetrating oration he raised issues that are all too relevant to the crisis of Christianity in America today: