The Democracy Dilemma : In a century when democracy triumphed over fascism and communism, why do so many fear for its resiliency?

“Democracy has no forefathers,” John Quincy Adams wrote in 1833, “it looks to no posterity, it is swallowed up in the present and thinks of nothing but itself.” A demo cratic society, as Adams un derstood it, was fated to live in an endless and impulsive present, subject to the fickle mood swings of public opinion that had turned him out of the presidency after a single term--just as it had his father, John, a generation earlier.

The fickleness of U.S. public opinion seems as manifest today as a century and a half ago--with one notable difference. Americans in the 19th Century were relentlessly optimistic. They thought their new democratic institutions and manners had liberated them from all sorts of Old-World tyrannies.

Their confidence in themselves often amazed visitors such as Alexis de Tocqueville, who came here in 1830, because he was convinced that the new democracy in America was clearing a path that Europe would ultimately follow. Like other Europeans then and since, Tocqueville found the gap between American pretensions and the crass reality of American life hard to take. But he also grasped the deeper sense of optimism and confidence that the democratic culture of the age of Andrew Jackson was working to foster.

Something of that confidence persists today. But in the fickleness of our own democratic moment, it is offset by murmurings and bleatings about the parlous state of American democracy. The late historian Richard Hofstadter’s idea of a recurring “paranoid style in American politics” has come back into vogue, as we try to make sense not only of the atrocity in Oklahoma City, but also of the existence of a network of radically alienated, gun-toting “militiamen,” convinced that their government and the sappy mass of citizenry are ready to betray their liberties to the black helicopters of the United Nations. The rant of talk radio and the journalistic obsession with “nannygates” and other trivial scandals leave us depressed over the low level of our democratic discourse. Poor Newt Gingrich rides to power and makes a fair stab at engineering a radical turn in national politics--only to have opinion polls tell him many Americans feel little has changed.

All this supports the conclusion that there is something fundamentally unhealthy about the body politic. It fuels the pervasive mood of unease that both Bill Clinton and Ross Perot drew on in 1992; that makes us wonder how George Bush could win a glorious victory yet be turned out of office, and that should warn the new Republican majority in Congress that their reign may prove short-lived.

This unease is the more troubling--and perplexing--at this moment in history. Here we are commemorating, in our fondness for round numbers, the 50th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. As last year’s D-day observances also revealed, much of the human interest in these events lies in the aged veterans--with their memories and tears and pride. But beyond their countless individual tales lies a more important story.

For these ceremonies, carefully staged as they are, should also be a cause for reflection on the resilience and underlying strength of democratic societies. In the years after 1939, the democracies of Britain and the United States discovered a surprising capacity to mobilize their peoples for total war. This achievement should not be taken for granted.

In the bitter aftermath of a decade of depression, that had drained the optimism from American life and exacerbated the deep class divisions in British society, it was by no means obvious that either nation would have the stomach for global war. That they did--sustaining casualties that admittedly were dwarfed by the horrific conflict in the Soviet Union and the East, but which vastly exceeded anything we could tolerate today--testifies to the existence of a deep reservoir of political loyalty and commitment that no one in 1939 could have confidently predicted.

Where does the commitment of democratic societies originate? Occasionally, democracies gain strength from the popularity and charisma of individual leaders--George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln in an earlier age, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill a half-century ago. But Lincoln won reelection only narrowly in 1864; Roosevelt’s margins of victory slipped in 1940 and 1944, and Churchill was turned out of office three months after the war in Europe ended. Democratic nations do not make a fetish of charismatic leadership. They rely more on collective deliberation and the forms of constitutional government; they require confidence not in the heroic talents of individuals but in the workings of the political system.

The deeper source of commitment in democratic societies lies in a sense of citizenship. A citizen is more than a subject of government or a seeker after the favors it offers. Citizenship, in its full meaning, implies a sense of membership in the community, a permanent stake in its welfare and an obligation to participate in its affairs--including, but by no means limited to, exercising the right to vote.

A simplified history of American democracy could be written around the general theme of the steady expansion of the circle of citizenship--and the gradual erosion of the notion of obligation that long accompanied it. This history would begin with the uncertainty that the Framers of the Constitution faced about the wisdom of extending political rights to the entire free male population.

But the heart of the story falls in the 19th Century. That was the great era of U.S. party politics--when the intense competition between parties created a powerful engine that engaged masses of Americans in public affairs.

Much of what passed for political activity then would strike us as empty hoopla--but that misses the point. Party loyalty gave Americans concrete reasons to identify themselves as citizens of a democracy. On rare occasions, it worked to democratize U.S. politics in more fundamental ways. That was true of the Republican crusade against slavery in the 1860s and of the Democratic commitment to ending racial segregation a century later--a commitment kept at great political cost.

Some observers understood there were other sources of democratic values as well. Some of the most incisive passages in de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” deal with the role that politics of local communities and voluntary organizations played in nurturing democratic habits and mitigating vices that irked elitists, such as John Quincy Adams. In our own time, latter-day Tocquevilleans have argued that the revival of American democracy requires finding new sources of communitarian loyalty to restore the sense of participation and membership. No one in his right mind would predict that political parties can still perform that function, but this only makes the need to find adequate substitutes all the more pressing.

Yet, the great paradox of contemporary democracy is that our ideas of the obligations of democratic citizenship have grown more constricted as the circle of membership in the democracy has expanded. Why this is so has become the subject of intense theorizing. Political scientists like to point to the collapse of the old party alignments and the rise of a superficial, media-based politics.

Some commentators blame the so-called “rights revolution” that began in the 1950s. By encouraging insular groups of Americans to press their particular interests in the absolute language of rights, our obsession with rights makes it nearly impossible to pursue a democratic politics of accommodation and compromise. Some share of blame can be heaped on media in its many forms, from the excessive prudery of investigative newspaper reporting to the pungent excrement of talk radio.

Whatever weight we assign to these and other sources of our democratic discontent, it seems clear that the turn of the next millennium will find democracy in a troubled state. There is a poignant irony in this. It is entirely possible that the history of this otherwise disastrous century will have to be written to explain just how resilient democracy turned out to be. Just as that old democrat Thomas Paine once said (of himself), that having a share in two revolutions was living a life to some purpose, so future historians might say that a democracy able to defeat fascism and outlast communism was not so feeble after all.

But for that history to be written, we will need to restore a greater measure of confidence in our capacity for self-government than our current bleatings about democracy will enable us to maintain. When so much of our politics revolves around faulting our leaders and institutions, we are really confessing that we have lost faith in our own ability to make rational choices as democratic citizens.