Democracy Matters by Cornel West Page A

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 thedispiriting 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 andimperial 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