This is an important question because it rests on a fallacy which haunts us in many aspects of life.
Correctly describing something doesn’t mean you hate what you describe. Identifying flaws in something, or somebody, doesn’t mean you hate them. My husband states correctly that my singing is atrocious. It’s truly very bad. But does his clear-eyed evaluation of my ridiculously poor singing skills mean he doesn’t love me? Of course not. He loves me profoundly. But it’s not an imaginary, perfect me that he loves. It’s the real me whose terrible singing is the least important of my very many flaws.
Often we hear honest descriptions of things or people being labeled as hate. As if love consisted in shrouding the object of this emotion in utterly unrealistic perfection. But love is the exact opposite. You don’t love your friends, your country, or your relatives because they are perfect. Love is patient and love is kind because it understands, accepts and tolerates the flaws.
Your love of democracy is not really love if you idealize it and don’t see its enormous flaws. Ask yourself if you can still love it if you fully accept what these flaws are. Some of these flaws are what I outlined yesterday:
- An unavoidable orientation towards the short-term and an impossibility of long-term goal-setting;
- A tendency towards humoring the lowest common denominator of voters.
If you can’t get excited about a system of government that accommodates millions of excitable, undisciplined, and low-intelligence Candace Owenses, if you can’t see the rightness and the beauty in such a system, guess what?
You don’t love democracy.
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