A Vision for a Democracy That Lives up to Its Ideals

2. Intractable Conflict Threat and Opportunity

U.S. President Abraham Lincoln gave one of his most famous speeches at the U.S. Civil War Gettysburg Battlefield. There he said:

“...these dead shall not have died in vain– that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

That is the ideal of democracy: a government created by the citizens of a country, run by the citizens of the country to benefit all the citizens of the country. That image is threatened again, in the United States and many other places around the world.

Part of the reason is that few people seem to have a vision — and certainly there is no shared vision — of what democracy is or should be. In hyper-polarized societies, such as the United States, democracy, if it is seen as a mechanism to balance competing interests, is seen to be less important than doing what it takes to make your side win. If the traditional tenents of democracy, such as free and fair elections, freedom of speech (at least in the United States) and freedom of the press, are seen to be working against one side's interests, those tenents seem to be less important than winning. And that is the end of democracy.

If democracy is to flourish, it is essential that people of all political beliefs develop a shared understanding of what it is, how it works, how it differs from other forms of government (particularly authoritarianism), and why it is superior to those other forms of government, at least for nations that have had democracy in the past. (The notion that democracy is the best form of government for places that have no experience with it is less clearly true.)

People often assert that American (and other Western) democracies are not living up to their promises. America is not providing a society in which all people are seen as "created equal." All are not granted their "unalienable Rights," including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." (Words in quotes are drawn from the U.S. Declaration of Independence.) But, democracy comes closer to providing those rights than do other forms of government, and we need to come together to develop a shared vision of how we can improve our democracy so that it does, indeed, live up to that ideal.