"You don't really believe in democracy, you English-speakers, you believe in it only when the right guys are going to win." Try to answer that and you're hit with the names of the democratically elected wrong guys our guys moved out of office, Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Salvadore Allende in Chile. Or, worse, a quote from Dwight Eisenhower backing Ngo Dinh Diem's cancellation of elections in Viet Nam: "80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh." Hold on, Vietnamese, you're not going to get any support from us for democracy.
So, if we state, "America is a democracy" proudly we're going to get a lot of noise. Can we quiet it down by making the statement doggedly? "We know, we know, but everybody has to compromise their ideals sometimes. In those times that you mention national self-interest trumped the democratic ideal, sure. But we had a good reason for that: serving our interest served the interest of democracy. The nation keeping democracy alive around the world has to keep itself alive, doesn't it? The Soviets used the same argument about communism and their country."
Say that, and then point out that we still have an election every four years, don't we? Peaceful transfer of power, that's our big claim. Democracy gives "power to the people most likely to be troublesome if deprived of it, the majority" (Post 39). We've got the essentials.
Clearly doggedness in that line can buy us some peace and quiet. But will it ever last? Aren't there always going to be some bad guys we want to keep out of power? And aren't there always going to be people of our own, maybe a majority, crying, "Bad! Bad! Keep them out! Keep them out!" Right now we've got Islamists threatening to win elections all over the Middle East. In Egypt there are some generals ready to keep them out. If we say, "Go ahead, generals, deprive them of power," how dogged can we be about those essentials? That's just what the generals will be violating. "Oh no," they'll hear us saying, "those people aren't going to be troublesome. They're just the majority." Yes, and we're the voice of democracy.
We don't know whether we'll talk like that yet but we know that if we do the word "democracy" is going to stick in our throats. And dogged repetition isn't going to help.
So, how will we speak the word? Should we maybe not use it? Find some other word for what we represent? No, we are still doing many things that only the word "democracy" identifies. And some of these are the ones that get us into the deepest trouble. Why do our leaders listen to those voices crying simply, "Bad! Bad!" — over communists in Viet Nam, or tyrants in Mesopotamia, or Islamists in Egypt? They know that the situations in those places are, or were, very complicated, and simple good-bad calls are very dangerous. They must know that. Educated people know that. Ah, but these educated people must, to stay in power, have the votes of the majority, which has never, in any country yet, had time (or inclination) to educate itself. So there you are. Democracy. There's no other word for it.
All right, we just have to find a becoming way of saying the word "democracy." It's tough. Luckily, though, we have some pretty good guides. Winston Churchill, after admitting that democracy was a terrible form of government, once added that it was "just better than all the others." There's our cue. Say it resignedly, or wryly. "Ah me, America is a democracy." In a store full of trash you've got to make the best of a bad bargain.
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