CHÁ QUENTE #238

“…Not for the first time in its long and stormy history, democracy is again confronted with the unexpected the un-named, the unknown, the unsolved. ‘Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful strokes’, said the poet, Walt Whitman. Indeed. But with the humility that comes from the wisdom that knows that the (fashionable) distinction between ‘consolidated’ and ‘transitional’ and ‘failed’ democracies, sometimes even between ‘good’ and ‘defective’ democracies, should not be turned into a dogma; that actually existing, ‘consolidated’ democracies are in no way blessed with divine immunity from internal corrosion and external weathering; that democracy is not a First Principle, that democracy as we have come to know it has no transversal or meta-historical guarantees; that it is a tender plant that grows only when embedded in a well-watered and nutritious soil of institutions and customs that need to be fertilized regularly with good and regular doses of the food called humility.”

O ideal de democracia é um universal?, John Keane

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