(I wrote this near the end of 2018 for a class on ‘The Retreat of Liberal Democracy’ taught by the famed EJ Dionne of Fall River and the Washington Post. In it, I tried to summarize what at the time I felt to be the best arguments in favor of liberal democracy. I think it is a highly useful essay to understanding some core things about our political ideals that are normally underlooked.)
The focus of this course has been to understand the threats to liberal democracy. Underlying this is an under-scrutinized value judgment, which assumes that liberal democracy is a good thing. Scrutinizing this assumption will require an exploration of what “liberalism” and “democracy” are, what their interaction does, and what makes it valuable. This paper will explain in depth the concept of “liberal democracy” as an ideal, and demonstrate that liberalism and democracy both need one another in order to create an ideal synthesis that can smoothly and productively mediate the individual and society. This synthesis is threatened by the modern decoupling of liberalism and democracy; the ultimate argument of this paper is that the ideals of liberal democracy must be embodied and realized by active and dedicated individuals in order for its institutions to survive.
It is important to first clarify our terms. The word “liberal,” as it’s used commonly today, as a negative label for progressives, or those to the left of center, only arose after the success of FDR’s New Deal liberalism, when the word became associated with “liberal” spending. But that was just a historically contingent manifestation of the long liberal project, the roots of which are deep in the Enlightenment, and many of which are today considered conservative or “libertarian” values. These values center around personal liberty, the idea of autonomy from coercion by external powers. Liberalism gave power to the individual. Enlightenment liberals, like our Founding Fathers, wanted to dissolve the inherited privileges of feudalism, divine monarchy, and state religion in order to make room for greater individual freedom for self-governance. In this way, liberalism is inherently connected to the genesis of democracy, although it is important to understand them as separate concepts.
Liberalism deifies the individual, while democracy deifies the collective. The most important liberal thinker for our Founders was probably John Locke, who believed that all men have a natural right to life, liberty, and property. The protection of these and other individual “rights” from infringement is the essence of liberalism. This is what Isaiah Berlin calls “negative freedom,” or “freedom from.” John Stuart Mill’s famous essay On Liberty is essential reading for anyone in the modern world if they want to understand liberalism. The guiding principle for his ideal liberalism is “that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self protection.” This hands-off principle ensures that “[o]ver himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign,” so that everyone can enjoy the freedom “of pursuing our own good in our own way,” (Mill). Mill makes the individual into an absolute, believing that, as a society, we all gain more by simply allowing every individual to be the fullest self-determined version of themselves. This unique individual development must be protected, because society tends to exert forces on the individual that make them bow to conformity. Mill fears the loss of novel value that comes with such homogenizing forces, recognizing that all the great ideas and actions of history have been accomplished by outward forces of individual eccentricity. The impulse that propels society forward comes out of the individual. Mill believes that liberal freedom for the individual promotes the “permanent interests of man as a progressive being.” Allowing individuals their own sphere gives them space to naturally grow; it unleashes a generative force inherent in humanity, which then fuels the progression of society. Freedom enables progress. This is part of why the post-Enlightenment “West” was able to grow so rapidly in so many dimensions, by allowing the varied innate individual talents of man to unfurl in their own directions. This is also why “liberal” is so often associated with “progressive,” a pairing which reflects the inherent tendency of man, of the universe, and of nature to expand in generative complexity.
However, when considering Mill’s ideals regarding individuals, it is important to understand the social nature of individuals. Individuals are not really “individual” at all; they are constituted by and constantly shaped by interaction with other individuals, with society. There is an essential interactionary element in liberalism. The ideal of liberalism believes that the social interactions of individuals— whether these interactions are in speech towards greater understanding of truths, or in economic markets towards greater production of value— are most generative when they are between the most diversely developed individual nodes. The legitimacy of this concept can be seen in the impressive power of the division of labor, which allowed Western economies to generate increasingly enormous revenues and capabilities. It can also be seen in the deliberations of a committee: a committee featuring an economist, a social scientist, a humanist, and a politician can be intuitively expected to have greater, more broadly adaptive problem solving capabilities compared to a committee made up of only politicians. Mill argues for free speech, because silencing any individual opinion reduces the interactive and generative capabilities of the whole. “If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” There is something inherently good about these “collisions”; Mill writes that “Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites” (Mill), and this dialectical, synthetic ideal extends beyond even the pursuit of truth. It is a principle found, in a general sense, in the nuclear fusion within stars, in the combinations of atoms and molecules, and in the adaptations of life to environment. However, this inherently interactive nature of liberal individuals, and the necessity to leave no individual point of view unspoken for both individual and collective good, points to the need that liberalism has for democracy.
Democracy is based on the idea of the inherent equality of human self-governance; that authentic power comes from below, from the people, and the only fair way to exercise collective power is through the consent of the governed determined by majority rule. Given that the collective is composed of individuals, democracy functions best under conditions of liberalism. Democracy is based on self-governance, and the beings who self-govern must have the free power to do so as individuals. These individuals would be indistinguishable from one another in pure democracy without liberalism, and thus there would be no generative interactions in the public sphere. Furthermore, democracy as a historically conditioned political reality only came about due to the efforts of liberal individuals, who had developed power through property and education, and who used their liberal powers to seize power from absolute monarchs based on principles that eventually led to larger and larger liberal democratic spheres. It is clear that democracy owes a lot to liberalism. The two main principles of democracy are the consent of the governed and the rule by the majority. The governed can only truly “consent” if they are individuals endowed with the liberal power to do so; and majority rule can only be viewed as superior to monarchical rule if you accept the idea of liberal interactions as generative, because this means that the interactions of the masses will tend to approach truth, approach some ideal mean, and therefore tend to be more than half right more than half of the time (or at least more right than one king’s choices). The difference is comparable to the difference between the accuracy of a single data point versus an aggregate. This must assume that the aggregate is composed of individually representative data points, and this is not guaranteed without an ideal liberalism allowing unique individual flourishing.
Just as liberalism empowers democracy, democracy empowers liberalism. The power inherent in individual liberty finds its source and its expression in collective democracy. Giving people political power in their own governance is an essential first step in allowing them to develop their own spheres of liberal autonomy. Furthermore, the individual is constituted by the collective; we are born by parents, socialized by our peers, find our individual place within the social and economic systems created by society, and are constantly made larger by the ideas we absorb from culture. There can be no individual without society. Democracy, as an ideal, gives all human beings an essential equality as members of the collective, thus increasing the quantity of liberal actors who could productively interact; and, it gives them the power to bring their uniqueness and individuality into the interactionary public sphere. This means more generative interactions, more stars colliding, which is a liberal good for “man as a progressive being.” Ultimately, the openness of democracy endows liberalized individuals with more possibilities via interactions in the civic sphere— in the form of ideas, roles, and avenues for expression— with which they can then pursue their own good in their own way. Democracy is the fluid solution in which liberal particles are encouraged to interact and of which they are formed in the first place.
A fully realized ideal of liberal democracy, therefore, ultimately requires the harmony of all of these ideas, which each support one another. It recognizes that individual interests are inevitably caught up in common interests, which can often only be pursued and realized in common, through liberal democracy. Charles Eliot Norton recognized that American democracy’s moral roots come from New England before its political roots, and that the circumstances of revolution “combined to promote not only individualism but also the habit of combined action in the community.” While individual wills may inevitably chafe, they can be soothed by the realized promise of liberal democracy in “the true brotherhood of man” finding happiness and personal fulfillment through democratic action, through “relations of mutual dependence,” (Kloppenberg). The inextricable interconnectedness of humanity bemoaned by Captain Ahab becomes the very route to personal happiness in liberal democracy. The tradition of Lincoln, Mill, and Tocqueville insists that “democracy works best when majorities are constrained by respect for individual liberty, when liberties are exercised in the context of rough equality, and when preferences are measured against a developing standard of justice… Maintaining that balance is the perpetual challenge of [liberal] democracy, as daunting and inspiring now as it has always been” (Kloppenberg). This ideal balance between liberalism and democracy occurs in a fluid, forgiving manner, mediating the interactions of individuals in society. We can now imagine liberal democracy as a harmonious system of nodes, pulsing and interacting and generating within a solution of themselves. As William James said, “the community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”
The image calls to mind a further meaning of the word “liberal,” meant in the dictionary sense of “open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values” and “concerned mainly with broadening general knowledge and experience.” This meaning of “liberal” incorporates the ideals of democracy in the openness and receptivity of the liberal subject. Fully committed liberal democracies or individuals are inherently progressive and ever-changing, due to their fluid and self-negating nature. They are willing to continuously adapt and evolve, both through self-development and adaptations to developments outside themselves, and are thus more in tune with the ever-developing nature of the world as time unfolds and the universe expands, a truth humans have always found difficult to deal with due to the conservative inertia in the idea of a “self.” This is an advantage that liberal democracy has over all other political and moral systems, which typically enable humans to cling to power or identity bitterly against the flow of the world. It’s something that Walt Whitman intuitively understood about the universe, and about America, and about himself. It also, curiously, calls to mind the image of one’s own body, made up of a collection of individual cells dedicated to the greater whole of oneself. These cells are mostly made of water, which we drink constantly and excrete constantly, ever making ourselves anew. This process is only made possible by the unique technology of the semi-permeable cell membrane. Water is democratic, and lipids are liberal. The cell is individual, yet collective; protected by a membrane, yet that membrane also works to take things in from the outside or vice versa. The relationship between the cell and the body is analogous to the ideal liberal-democratic relationship between the individual and society. Thus, democratic liberalism, in all true senses of the ideal, is good and natural.
Liberal democracy, as the fusion of two distinct yet intertwined ideas, represents the synthesis that has dominated political life in the West since the rise of America, and the great poet of America, Walt Whitman, captures this fusion in his Democratic Vistas. The bearded bard writes that “[a]s the greatest lessons of Nature through the universe are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom, the same present the greatest lessons also in New World politics and progress.” This lesson demands both “a large variety of character,” a liberal ideal, and “full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions,” which is accomplished only in the open air of the democratic space. Indeed, to Whitman, the interplay of these forces is like the weather, “whose ceaseless play of counterpart upon counterpart brings constant restoration and vitality.” Liberal individuals are the air molecules aswirl in their own paths, based on their trajectories, inclinations, and the particular way they reflect the all-touching sun. Democracy is the bright blue of the sky which illuminates and makes possible this play, and mediates interactions and conflicts. Democracy is the “fervid and tremendous IDEA, melting everything with resistless heat, and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional power,” which reconciles the individual into the universal melt. Liberal democracy is the “doctrine or theory that man, properly train’d in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself, surrounding and providing for, not only his own personal control, but all his relations to other individuals, and to the State.” Here Whitman acknowledges the democratic responsibility inherent in the interconnectedness of individuals with each other and with the State. Whitman identifies the essential contradiction of America as the inevitable conflicts between the individual and the aggregate, even though he idealizes these contradictions away in the tremendous melting of the democratic solution. In fact, he sees the contradicting ideas as essential to one another: “This idea of perfect individualism it is indeed that deepest tinges and gives character to the idea of the aggregate. For it is mainly or altogether to serve independent separatism that we favor a strong generalization, consolidation. As it is to give the best vitality and freedom to the rights of the States (every bit as important as the right of nationality, the union), that we insist on the identity of the Union at all hazards.” True to form, Whitman is happy to say “very well then! I contradict myself,” and embrace the contradictions between liberalism and democracy as necessary for the fullest expression of each.
But despite Whitman’s idealism, these contradictions are not so easily wished away. The standard liberal democratic idea, while lovely in theory, faces many problems in practice. There are inherent tensions between individual interests and collective interests which constantly threaten liberal democracies, which are by no means infallible. This is why the Founders were not pure democrats; they set up the Constitution and the Bill of Rights with these inherent tensions in mind. On the liberal side, individual wills cannot be expected to always accord with public good. Self-interest is a seemingly inescapable human condition, which will lead liberal individuals to use their powers in antidemocratic ways to preserve their own economic or social interests without concern for the other. The example of slavery highlights this: slavery was a property “right,” protected by classical liberal ideals descending from John Locke; on the other hand, slavery is clearly antidemocratic, given that slaves were human beings denied self-governance. Slave interests were driven so far by their perceived rights that they were willing to secede from the Union when they didn’t get their way, the ultimate symbol of rejecting democracy. In Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, he recognized the balkanizing effect of this democratic severance. If a minority, when it loses a democratic dispute or an election, “will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which, in turn, will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them, whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority.” A democratic majority, restrained by law and subject to change with every election, is “the only true sovereign of a free people.” Those who reject majority “fly to anarchy or to despotism” (Kloppenberg).
There are well recognized dangers on the converse side as well. Democracy has a tendency towards “tyranny of the majority,” a problem highlighted by Mill and echoed by James Madison and other Federalist founders as the issue of factions abusing their power in a democratic system. The aggregate, if unchecked, will subsume or destroy the individual or the minority. Pure majority rule can rule over important individual capacities, and was incapable of ending the now-clear moral evil of slavery, which was supported by a huge majority of the voting population. This tension is exemplified in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates for the Illinois Senatorship, which Douglas won by appealing to majority rule and racism. Of course, one can easily argue that neither democracy nor liberalism was functioning in an ideal way in this situation given the limited electorate; but the reality of the situation is more important than the ideal, since the sin happened and would have continued to happen without the further tragedy of war, which was brought about by these inherent tensions in liberal democracy.
The tensions between liberalism and democracy have led to a disturbing trend of “decoupling” between the two concepts in the modern world, and a retreat of liberal democracy across the world. In Yascha Mounk’s book “The People vs. Democracy,” he argues that people have taken liberal democracy for granted for a long time, and that it is currently in danger of collapse if current trends continue. Moving from the assumption of the natural pairing of liberalism and democracy, he explains how these two concepts have been increasingly at odds over recent years, leading to instances of “illiberal democracy” and “undemocratic liberalism.” He writes that in “democracies around the world, two seemingly distinct developments are playing out. On the one hand, the preferences of the people are increasingly illiberal: voters are growing impatient with independent institutions and less and less willing to tolerate the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. On the other hand, elites are taking hold of the political system and making it increasingly unresponsive: the powerful are less and less willing to cede to the views of the people. As a result, liberalism and democracy, the two core elements of our political system, are starting to come into conflict,” (Mounk). This conflict only increases the chaos of the modern world, even though it itself is the product of destabilizing developments including the flattening of once-increasing Western living standards, the evaporation of homogenous ethnic group dominance, and the chaotic influence of social media on the public sphere. The rise of “democracy without rights” enables the “tyranny of the majority” and threatens minorities; the rise of “rights without democracy” enables billionaires and technocrats to exclude people from decision-making for personal benefit and leaves most people feeling powerless.
The decline of liberal democracy is troubling. Not only is liberal democracy the most ideal and “natural” way to mediate and optimize the inescapable relationships between individuals and society, as argued in the first half of the paper, but it also has utilitarian justifications. According to research done by the highly reputable Brookings Institution, consolidated liberal democracies provide the best path we know of towards domestic and international peace and security. Firstly, Brookings authors Madeleine Albright and Mehdi Jomaa note that “[t]he evidence affirms the standard observation that democracies do not go to war against one another.” Furthermore, “the data also prove that democracies are less likely to spawn internal armed conflicts or experience deadly terrorism because they channel dissent through nonviolent means and manage violence through respect for the rule of law and human rights. Authoritarian and failed states, on the other hand, are more likely to experience intra- and interstate conflict, generate refugees, hinder women’s equality, and harbor violent extremists,” (Albright & Jomaa). The ameliorative powers of liberal democracies, when allowed to flourish, foster peace. The Encyclopedia Britannica adds to this list, stating that liberal democracies also tend to be more prosperous than nondemocratic countries, and even tend to more effectively foster human development as measured by health, education, and personal income (Encyclopedia Britannica).
Liberal democracies are also the ideal form of government given humanity’s existential condition, according to philosopher John Rawls. We do not choose what situation we are born into; existence precedes essence, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously asserted. We are thrown into life and forced to be free. Taking this intuition a step further forces us to face what Rawls calls the “veil of ignorance”; if we had some choosing self, before birth, and had no idea of what our socioeconomic situation would be, which is of course the reality of the situation before anyone is born, then, Rawls argues, we would want to be born into a liberal democratic society because that would afford us the best shot at a good life through the liberties and societal supports liberal democracies offer. Specifically, Rawls argues we would choose a liberal democracy with a large welfare state, given the likelihood we are born near the large lower end of the socioeconomic lottery (Britannica). Thus, Rawls even validates the modern idea of “liberal” as associated with large welfare states which ensure that the unequal distribution of wealth does not irredeemably handicap us from the starting gate; or, in other words, that the liberal reality of inequality does not existentially weaken democratic equality in personhood and potential. This all means that the decline of liberal democracy is a moral failure by the living, a failure to provide the unborn behind the veil with the best opportunities in the future.
However, the tensions inherent to liberal democracy, which reflect natural tensions between the individual and society inherent in the human condition, are ameliorable through the full extension and realization of the moral, and not merely political, ideals of liberalism and democracy. This extension and realization requires the active and collective effort of individuals. As SpiderMan knows, with great power comes great responsibility. Liberalism gives enormous power to individuals, and these individuals must learn to cultivate that power. The American Transcendentalists believed that a culture could only become fully democratic once individuals had become fully self-reliant. They felt that “[m]erely asking people as they were what they desired was pointless. Instead of following their principles unreflectively, individuals had to learn to interrogate their desires critically,” (Kloppenberg). They must self-cultivate if they are to be autonomous in a meaningful and valuable sense.
Furthermore, there are moral duties required of autonomous individuals. Autonomy means taking responsibility for oneself, including the damages possibly caused by one’s actions to the inextricable social fabric within which individuals exist. The individual rights championed by 18th century revolutionaries had been conceived within a framework of moral obligations; by the 1880s, these obligations had been forgotten, leaving only self-interested individuals pursuing unrestrained, narrowly-conceived prosperity without public responsibility. “Rights freed from obligations can render individuals self-centered,”(Kloppenberg). The main obligations for a moral liberal are the obligations of humility and restraint, the ideals on Montaigne’s medal, which prevent individuals from imposing themselves excessively upon others and from acting in a wholly self-interested manner, and allows the individual to submit themselves more frictionlessly to the democratic whole and the needs of other autonomous individuals. A society composed of these moral individuals would feel less tension between its parts, leading to a greater and less contradictory whole. Restraint is an unwritten norm that allows political institutions to function, by parties and politicians restraining themselves from full competition to the death. The erosion of this virtue is evidenced by the increasing “constitutional hardball” of the Republican Party, and leads to the death of democracy (Ziblatt & Levinsky).
By extending and realizing the moral implications of the ideal of democracy, which is based on the fundamental equality and validity of all other human beings, as well as our own recognition of our essential interconnectedness with and responsibilities to them, individuals can orient themselves in a way which meshes more smoothly with the democratic whole. The main commitments by which moral democrats can dedicate themselves to achieving this are deliberation and reciprocity. Deliberation refers to the interactive process by which the democratic process takes place, most easily recognizable through speech, in what Jurgen Habermas would call “ideal speech situations.” Individuals in democracies must dedicate themselves to this self-abnegating process of destructive, generative interaction by which two partial sides are brought to greater understandings of truth and of each other’s points of view. Debate helps individuals see beyond their narrow self-interest and understand a larger idea of self-interest where society is the self. Communication is a fundamental principle of democracy. The interactionary process refines ideas towards truth, or towards the best possible option knowable by the democratic whole at that time. “Democracy thrives… when individuals must articulate the reasons for their commitments; it withers when individuals retreat to unexamined willfulness,” (Kloppenberg). Only by authentic democratic deliberation can the masses decide what is truly best, thus legitimizing the rule of majority, and all would be obligated to accept the rational results of this intersubjective communicative action in which they took part. Sometimes, in deliberation, it becomes clear that one’s narrow self interest is other than the greater interest of the whole; in these cases, a truly democratic person would practice the virtue of forbearance and choose to consent, in faith that, later on, the others would practice forbearance towards them in the same situation. Forbearance is another individual virtue which Ziblatt & Levinsky identify as deficient in modern American politics, exemplified by the Republican Party’s refusal to allow Judge Merrick Garland a hearing (Ziblatt & Levinsky).
This all depends on reciprocity, an ethic by which individuals interact with one another; it encourages mutual responsibility towards one another. This mutuality means that you see the other members of the democracy as on the same team as you, and you are willing to do for them whatever you can, and you know they will do the same for you. It is a dedication to the Other, and it has evolutionary bases in our early social evolution, which was based partially on the idea of “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours, and we’ll both be better off.” Democracy ultimately cultivates this mutuality and encourages individuals to become dedicated to society, to communal good, which fosters what is known by moral psychologists like Lawrence Kohlberg as “postconventional morality.”
An interesting element to these virtues of forbearance and reciprocity is their Christian heritage. Mill recognized that “[o]nce early Christians had challenged distinctions, it became possible to imagine fuller equality among human beings.” By internalizing the Christian ethos, the commands to love God (which is society, according to Durkheim) and to love thy neighbor as thyself (a postconventional morality that transcends narrow self-interest), the promise of a mutually loving and reciprocal society can be realized, and commands of force can ideally be seen as merely a temporary expedient on the path to autonomous reciprocity among equals (Kloppenberg). Thomas Jefferson and later Abraham Lincoln acknowledged this necessary benevolence in liberal democracies when they implored Americans to remember that, no matter what, “[w]e are not enemies, but friends.” Not only does the Christian ethic feed into the ideal of democracy, but it also feeds into the ideal of progressive liberalism: as Kloppenberg puts it, “[i]nheritors of the Judeo-Christian tradition or Mill’s ethics of benevolence see the call to love others for their own sake, and interaction with others premised on that principle, as occasions for self-reflection and self-transcendence.” Or, as Saint Paul wrote to the Philippians, “if you wish to live consistent with the ideals of Jesus, you should learn to see through one another’s eyes, to think with one another’s minds, and to treat each other with charity. Resist contentiousness and pride, and act from humility, letting each one look not to his own interests but to those of others,” (Kloppenberg). The Christian ethos is deeply connected to the liberal-democratic ethos, providing a beautiful throughline connecting the greatest accomplishments of “the West.” Forbearing love, enacted by individuals in a society, is a critical component in realizing the full potential of democratic liberalism.
Liberal democracy is the most ideal way of organizing society that has yet existed on earth. It allows individuals maximum self-cultivation, and meshes this as optimally as possible with the inherent interconnectedness of all individuals in society, like how semi-permeable cells function within a larger organism. It reflects some of the most important laws of the natural universe: change, growth, interaction, synthesis, and love. It has been shown to promote human welfare, and provide ideal starting situations for new human beings. Liberal democracy is threatened by the changing world, the decoupling of its co-dependent aspects, and the lack of active fulfillment by individuals. But these threats do not mean doom for liberal democracy, for if the moral and ideal implications of liberal democracy are embodied and realized by individual citizens, then the system can work much more smoothly, and the inherent frictions can be reduced through restrained autonomy, democratic forbearance, and self-negating love. Liberal democracy only came into existence historically through the toil of those who believed in it and fought for it; that is also the only way it can be maintained. But the natural beauty of the ideal of liberal democracy self-referentially indicates its value, not only as a system, but as an idea worth championing, an inspirational call to action, a horizon worth striving towards.
Works Cited
Albright, Madeleine and Mehdi Jomaa, “Liberal Democracy and the Path to Peace and Security.” Brookings Institute, September 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/research/liberal-democracy-and-the-path-to-peace-and-security/
Kloppenberg, James, “Toward Democracy.” Oxford University Press, June 3 2016.
Levitsky, Steven and Daniel Ziblatt, “How Democracies Die.” Crown Publishing, January 16 2018.
Mill, John Stuart, “On Liberty.” 1859.
Mounk, Yascha, “The People vs. Democracy.” Harvard University Press, March 5 2018.
Whitman, Walt, “Democratic Vistas.” 1871.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “The Theory of Democracy.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/democracy/The-theory-of-democracy
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 