I once found the spirit of democracy at a church that met in a movie theater. The church leaders were refugees from the corporate world, and true to their business roots, they had cleverly disrupted the Christian worship industry. They saved money on facilities (like pulpits, steeples and pipe organs) by renting underutilized commercial space, then reinvested the savings in the ministry (including the ministries of slick slide decks and stadium-quality audio equipment). Few things say America more efficiently than an ex-businessman concluding a sermon on the Gospel just before the Sunday matinee begins on the screen behind him.
This church entered my life because my wife and I decided that our children should have some experience of the disciplines and the pleasures of collective spiritual practice. As expats from our own childhood religious communities, we wanted them to have what we had: lifelong access to some arena of experience—a song, a prayer, a body of scripture: something—that might provide comfort in an existential pinch. A spiritual home to which they could always return, even if they chose not to stay in permanent residence.
Our search for this spiritual home eventually led us to a well-funded, highly organized, nondenominational outfit called “The Perfecting Church.” The name came from the founders’ commitment to a powerful idea. The God of Abraham and Isaac—and, importantly, of King David, with his storied (and appalling) moral lapses—does not demand perfection from His beloved. He requires just that we honestly try to live up to the lofty standards of Christian ethics. We are not a perfect church, the leaders would say, but we are perfecting ourselves in the image of God.
I admired the ethos of the Perfecting Church even if I did not feel completely at home there. There was something deep in the church’s recognition that we are all cracked vessels, in its embrace of both our brokenness and our capacity for correction. This insight finds expression in many traditions of ethical thought and spiritual practice, and it is also something that many of the participants in these traditions forget. They, we, become judgmental and condemnatory, losing track of the humility and the self-critical edge that attend the thought that I am not now and will never be perfect, but I can still work toward perfection.
The version of this perfectionist ethos that I know best runs most famously through the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, where, some people argue, it informs the best of American culture. How much it in fact informs the culture is an empirical question that I’m not competent to answer. But I can say that familiar touchstones of American democratic life recommend a kind of perfectionism.
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For most people, the word “perfectionism” probably names an unhealthy psychological tendency. A perfectionist in this sense needs, yearns, to be totally unimpeachable. For a person so afflicted, failure is something to be lamented and eradicated, not an occasion for learning or growth. For some scholars, “perfectionism” also names an approach to political organization. The idea here is that politics is about actively promoting the good life rather than, as liberalism standardly has it, preserving the neutral space in which each person can pursue their own good in their own way. Like the psychology of excessive striving, political perfectionism also requires handling with care, if not outright rejection. Whenever someone with an army tells you what your life is about and regards any dissent or questioning as insubordination or error, keep an eye on your purse (or your voter-registration card, or your passport).
The Perfecting Church stood for something distinct from both of these ideas. It explicitly rejected the psychology of excessive striving, which is openly at odds with the thought that God loves the imperfect but sincere believer. And it made no attempt to conscript the state into its soul-building ministries. The church leaders largely steered clear of politics and left to Caesar what was Caesar’s.
A vibrant and healthy democratic society requires a secular, ethical, democratic analogue to the Perfecting Church’s ethos. Democratic perfectionism is distinct from both modes of perfectionism noted above: it is not about the psychology of excessive striving or the politics of centralized life plans. It concerns, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer and the condemner of every success.” It concerns the fact that “every action admits of being outdone,” and that “life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn.”
I first learned to think about perfectionism from the late Stanley Cavell, who portrayed it as cutting across the usual lines that philosophers draw when they study ethics. It is, he said, “not a competing theory of the moral life, but something like a dimension or tradition of the moral life that spans the course of Western thought and concerns what used to be called the state of one’s soul.” What defines this tradition is an insistence on the cultivation of character and an emphasis on the burdens and opportunities of self-creation. These two elements together pull against overly abstract, overly static, rule-bound approaches to ethical life. Sometimes I think of perfectionism in connection with William James, who wrote that the highest ethical life consists in breaking rules that have grown too narrow for the case at hand. More often I think of John Dewey, who wrote that the real question of ethics is simply this: What kind of person will I be?
Ideas about rights, virtues and justice, about the nature of moral judgment, political authority and cultural recognition—all these and more are resources for answering Dewey’s question. But the perfectionist puts these resources to their best use by wearing a commitment to them, and to the self that is committed to them, like a loose garment. The self and its commitments are all grist for the mill of self-excavation and self-criticism, which may allow for higher and better ways of holding these commitments and imagining this self.
Thinking of the self as something to be perfected, even if ultimate and final perfection is not in the offing, is a way of raising the stakes beyond self-improvement. The aim is not incremental improvement, though that is valuable. The aim is to set a momentous agenda for a life of constructive self-interrogation, then to engage in the serious effort and passionate conviction that is called forth by that momentous aim. Perfection, however unattainable, is the heavenly mark that galvanizes the self—the fallible, humble, but aspiring self that can, despite itself, come to regard goodness and right as cold and lifeless abstractions.
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What does all this have to do with democracy? It may seem odd to link the idea of perfection, interpreted as generously or creatively as you like, with a political form that towering figures in political thought and practice have often described as profoundly imperfect. Aristotle and Plato were famously dubious about democracy’s prospects. Churchill, perhaps more famously, called it the worst form of government except for all the others.
It might seem even odder to think that perfectionism could have anything to do with American democracy now, as the republic appears to teeter on the brink of collapse. One might think that our current crises are the result of the excesses of democracy, of politicians pandering to the masses for votes instead of leading with integrity and principle. Or that they are the inevitable outgrowths of a culture that prizes the mass production of satisfaction over the difficult pursuit of rare excellence. In these and other ways, one might worry that a political form rooted in leveling, in prioritizing the standing preferences of the demos over the enlightened ambitions of their betters—the well-born, the better-informed, the conscious revolutionary, whomever—has no room, has no resources, for Emersonian flights of fancy.
As it happens, there are other ways of thinking about democracy, ways that run through Emerson and Dewey to people like Catholic activist Dorothy Day; activist-organizer-theoreticians like Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker and Bob Moses; and political theorist Sheldon Wolin. For these figures, it matters that ordinary people are still moral persons, carrying the worth that attaches to us all. It matters also that elites are still just people, limited in their sagacity, whatever their education or upbringing, by the boundaries of their own assumptions and experiences. These figures start with a faith in the capacities of ordinary people and an abiding suspicion that elites in government, when detached from ordinary people and their attempts to weather the storms of social change, will not reliably govern either justly or well.
Thinking of democracy in this way puts the prospect of perfectionism back on the table. On this approach, democracy is a political orientation that cycles through various forms and institutions in an ongoing struggle to manage the forces that shape the lives of ordinary people. It is not reducible to “first past the post” elections, or to the two-party system, or to any of the familiar institutional features of our current attempts at democratic life. It is not rooted in a grudging attempt to accommodate the needs of the benighted masses solely to win their consent to hold office. It is rooted in the sense that the masses are people, in the commitment to honoring and cultivating their capacities for self-government, and in the determination to recruit their insights into the ever-evolving conditions of their own lives into a shared project of world-building and social amelioration. If this problem-solving dynamism is what democracy means and requires, then an Emersonian perfectionism is not just available: it is essential.
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It may appear that I am loading the dice. One needn’t think of democracy in this manner. And if perfectionism depends on this way of thinking, then how should it, how can it, bear on the thinking of people who have different ideas?
If I were trying to justify a perfectionist approach to democratic life, or a democratic approach to political life, building either up from the foundations, then yes, I would have to provide much more in the way of grounding than I have so far, using many more words than I have room for. But this is an invitation, not a justification. It is a sketch for an experimental design. We Americans have already launched an experiment with something we call democracy, and many of us routinely act as if we believe that this word means the kinds of things that the figures named above thought it meant. If we do in fact believe this, then we are well on the way to having committed ourselves to a kind of perfectionist ethos. I propose simply to say what this means.
If, on the other hand, one either no longer believes in the capacities of ordinary people or never did, then the story I mean to tell will lose some of its resonance. It should still have some appeal, for reasons I’ll come to. But if one thinks of the people as sheep, fit only to be herded by experts or sacrificed to the whims and appetites of Great Men, rather than as partners in the work of building and rebuilding a shared life, then perfectionism and democracy will point in rather different directions. To a point, anyway.
Perfectionism does not proceed from any particular political ideology or approach. It is not reducible to liberalism or progressivism, conservatism or socialism, right or left. It does not depend on or entail any particular account of the good life or any suite of policy tools or electoral strategies. It is, instead, a way of asking, and of reminding one to ask, what politics and policy are for, and what our political lives and communities are about. Perfectionism does not, for example, tell the egalitarian whether to pursue equality of result or of opportunity. Nor does it tell the revolutionary whether to embrace or refuse violence. It counsels a way of exploring these questions. More than this, it enjoins us to ask what kind of people we need to be to ask and answer these questions, and to do so responsibly and with integrity.
All that said, I am interested in a specifically democratic form of perfectionism. I regard it as a resource for extending and reinventing an American experiment in crisis. Emerson’s “flying Perfect,” inspiring and condemning every success, is an apt image for the kind of democracy that America’s most thoughtful critics have pushed it to achieve. The thought that all men were created equal has had its measure of success. It has inspired much of whatever recommends the idea of America to those who value it. But the same thought, wielded by the children of slaves, by the suffragettes, and by many others—Baker, King, Moses, Day—whose equality the founders could hardly imagine, condemns much of the reality that grew up in the shade of that thought. One way to condemn is to repudiate and reject. But another way, the perfectionist way, is to renew and reinvent, on the theory that there is something here to build on, something to extend, something to perfect.
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I say that perfectionism and democracy diverge only to a point because a sincere perfectionism in this moment will have a great deal to offer across the ideological spectrum. The sense that things are dire is widely shared. For example, some of us are horrified at what President Trump and his allies have done and promise to do to the social world we once knew. But sincere adherents to that movement are themselves horrified by much of what this world has already become. They regard the quest for American greatness as an urgent exercise—one might say a crusade—of sufficient weight to justify storming the Capitol (and doing much else). For them as for people like me, something important teeters on the brink of collapse.
This pan-partisan catholicity of concern is precisely why it is important to consider the prospects for an ethical, democratic perfectionism. Trump’s coalition proposes to address the crisis of American life by demolishing much of the infrastructure of that life. It is easy enough to give this proposal a perfectionist tinge. A latter-day Emerson might recommend clearing away the accumulated dead wood of the deep-state bureaucracy (and of our civil rights jurisprudence, and of the higher-education sector, and so on) so that new ideas and approaches can blossom into view like flowers in the spring. Emerson says, “The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such.” This is close to saying that the program for restoring American greatness only strikes terror in those who resist and resent necessary change. But consider the distance between this vision for casting away American carnage and James Baldwin’s invitation in The Fire Next Time. As the Sixties brought to a head the contradictions of a democratic republic built on slaveholding and genocidal expropriation, Baldwin found these words:
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands. … If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
Set aside Baldwin’s standard willingness to write as if blacks and whites are the only actors in America’s racial dramas. Focus instead on his appeal to growth, to creating the consciousness of the others with whom we share this social world in a spirit of loving correction. Compare this with Trump’s insistence on retribution against enemies with inherent incapacities. And then think of the way this rhetoric fuels a campaign of deliberate and theatrically exaggerated cruelty and bellicosity, all rooted in the assumption, the conviction, that he is the infallible (or, at any rate, unquestionable) arbiter of all good and right.
What would a political culture committed to perfectionist self-criticism make of Trump’s obsession with American greatness? It might concede that greatness could mean breaking the fetters of bureaucracy in the name of manly vigor and creative destruction, and that this could require bringing independent agencies to heel and grinding cabinet agencies to dust. But it might then ask: Is this all greatness can be? Is there a wider circle to draw around this one? What if something greater awaits the recognition that government agencies, at their best, are force multipliers, making it possible for humans acting in concert to do things—and do them carefully, soberly, intelligently—that isolated individuals, no matter how wealthy or self-assured, cannot do?
Perhaps greatness means summoning the resolve to question all received wisdom, and rejecting the settled judgments of experts in climate science and public health is a mark of intellectual self-reliance. But what if something greater awaits the realization that truth-seeking is a joint project, not settled by individual fiat of the great leader or the intuitions of the anti-establishment reactionary? What if something greater awaits the recognition that structured, collective inquiry—call this “science”—is a way of going beyond the individual self, of growing, of expanding one’s capacities to face life’s challenges? Consider, on the one hand, the careful accumulation and interrogation of data by many people over many years, leading to a plan for the successful eradication of a disease that has burdened human life since time immemorial. Consider, on the other hand, the rapid and unevenly scheduled disassembly of the mechanisms for gathering this data, for making these plans and for saving these lives, to replace them with worse than nothing. Which speaks more eloquently to humanity’s prospects for greatness?
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Whatever perfectionism can offer to members of Trump’s coalition, it interests me most as a resource for some of his opponents, or as a marker of how manifestly and completely they have failed to meet the moment. The leaders of the Democratic Party seem to equate democracy with the techniques of policy design, fundraising and strategic communications. Even after several cycles of electoral failure and despite mountains of data showing their declining purchase on the hearts and minds of actual and potential voters, the Democrats’ posture may be as distant from Baldwin’s invitation to ethical growth and loving correction as the MAGA movement is.
The cautious repose of the erstwhile opposition represents a great many things, but I offer it here as an example of an underdeveloped capacity for transformative self-criticism. The leaders of the Democratic Party seem truly incapable of deep self-interrogation. Questioning the assumptions that animate their incremental shifts in strategy seems unthinkable, even when their technical recalibrations fail, and fail again.
One measure of this failure is the inability to receive suggestions and criticisms from more left-leaning elements of the party—to say nothing of critiques from the actual left that lives outside the party, among differently affiliated democratic socialists and others. Party leaders—party elders, I feel compelled to say—treat recommendations for change like the rantings of insubordinate children, or like encroachments on a terrain that they occupy by divine right. The recommendations might be wrong, or ill-conceived. But that seems like a matter to be decided by sober reflection, not assumed a priori. Why not treat these suggestions as contributions to a joint project that has failed to keep pace with evolving social conditions? Why not consider that there are other circles to draw around the narrow and shrinking circle of clientelist political triangulation?
Another measure of this failure, one that overlaps somewhat with the first, is the national party leadership’s indifference to the wellsprings of civic energy waiting to be tapped in local settings all over the country. Local activists and leaders—at the state and municipal levels; in party leadership and elsewhere—are drawing new circles, in Emerson’s sense. Some of them, as in Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign for the mayoralty of New York City, are doing this on the strength of ideas and techniques from far outside the box of standard-issue democratic politics. Others have no interest in ideologies like democratic socialism, and could, if given the chance, offer the national party some fairly straightforward ways to link its traditional aims and messaging to the challenges that shape the lives of everyday people, and to the energies that people bring to bear in facing those challenges. But these local actors are—I would say, and the ones I know about would agree with me—too rarely drawing the attention of leadership. When they do win the spotlight, it is often because the national organization feels compelled to anoint its own local standard-bearer, however comically flawed or indistinguishable from the Republican opposition, to prevent the organically generated local candidate from upsetting some distant apple cart.
I say this not as a member of the party but as a member of a massive but inchoate coalition that the Democrats seem determined not to activate or leverage. Our political system makes it imperative to work, for many purposes, through one of the established parties. Trump’s party has given itself fully to forces that are determined to abolish the vision of America that I’ve allowed myself to hope for, a vision like the one that I attributed above to Baker and Moses and King. Chuck Schumer’s party gives lip service to at least some aspects of that vision and has some history of speaking to and for the people who share my interest in it. I don’t trust the Democratic Party as it stands, nor do I have faith or confidence in it. But it is, for me, the only reasonable repository of political hope at scale in this moment.
None of this is to suggest that either left politics or local affiliations are any guarantee of ethical integrity, effective policy or successful politics. Irrespective of party affiliation, sphere of influence or ideological conviction, those who take it upon themselves to do the work of democratic politics must contend with the kinds of dangers and temptations noted above—the seductions of charismatic leadership, the temptations of technocratic expertise and so on. For all of them, if they take democracy seriously, questioning and criticism must inform retail efforts to engage and mobilize people on the ground. One key to doing this is to join these people in regarding their lives as more than cost-benefit analyses and survey results. Their lives are their lives, with human stakes and meanings, ennobled by ambitions and shadowed by disappointments. A successful politics must speak to this dimension of human striving, especially in times of rapid and far-reaching change.
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We never actually joined the Perfecting Church. My family and I hovered on its margins but were never able to commit fully. Filing past dormant popcorn machines dampened my spiritual ardor; the weekly sermons sped too swiftly over theological puzzles and cared too little for preacherly eloquence. The church never felt like church.
I did briefly join the Democratic Party, long ago. But I left soon after, and have never felt compelled to reconsider that decision. The leadership throws lavish conventions and sends innumerable text solicitations and gathers and spends a lot of money. But their vision of democracy rarely feels like more than a series of genuflections to established structures and authorities.
A perfectionist orientation to democracy can stand as a reminder that political life is more than the forms it calls forth. A society’s commitment to democracy outruns and outlives and exceeds its characteristic institutions as surely as the life of a vibrant church reaches beyond the building that houses it. Even the iconoclasts among us, those of us who bristle at the compromises of teamwork and find ourselves undone by the inevitable disappointments of human relatedness, can find a role to play in the perfectionist renewal of democratic life. Because this renewal requires critique and questioning and creative reinvention, all of which can give even the most solitary artists, scholars and writers a role to play. We need only accept some version of the thought that we are all woven into a single garment of destiny, or, put differently, that I am because we are.
Perhaps the main payoff of democratic perfectionism is that it offers a reminder about this aspirational and, in a way, spiritual dimension of political life. To cite a late sermon of the great Gardner Taylor: “There is something wrong with people who are so hardened that nothing makes them gasp, nothing makes something of awe stir in them.” To think of our democracy as something worthy of perfecting—not just as something to improve or refine or furnish with more efficacious policies, but to perfect—is to reach for something awe-inspiring in the human condition. A democratic politics worthy of the name must speak to this dimension of our shared lives, and should continually steel its attempts to do so against the shifting winds that blow against it.
I once found the spirit of democracy at a church that met in a movie theater. The church leaders were refugees from the corporate world, and true to their business roots, they had cleverly disrupted the Christian worship industry. They saved money on facilities (like pulpits, steeples and pipe organs) by renting underutilized commercial space, then reinvested the savings in the ministry (including the ministries of slick slide decks and stadium-quality audio equipment). Few things say America more efficiently than an ex-businessman concluding a sermon on the Gospel just before the Sunday matinee begins on the screen behind him.
This church entered my life because my wife and I decided that our children should have some experience of the disciplines and the pleasures of collective spiritual practice. As expats from our own childhood religious communities, we wanted them to have what we had: lifelong access to some arena of experience—a song, a prayer, a body of scripture: something—that might provide comfort in an existential pinch. A spiritual home to which they could always return, even if they chose not to stay in permanent residence.
Our search for this spiritual home eventually led us to a well-funded, highly organized, nondenominational outfit called “The Perfecting Church.” The name came from the founders’ commitment to a powerful idea. The God of Abraham and Isaac—and, importantly, of King David, with his storied (and appalling) moral lapses—does not demand perfection from His beloved. He requires just that we honestly try to live up to the lofty standards of Christian ethics. We are not a perfect church, the leaders would say, but we are perfecting ourselves in the image of God.
I admired the ethos of the Perfecting Church even if I did not feel completely at home there. There was something deep in the church’s recognition that we are all cracked vessels, in its embrace of both our brokenness and our capacity for correction. This insight finds expression in many traditions of ethical thought and spiritual practice, and it is also something that many of the participants in these traditions forget. They, we, become judgmental and condemnatory, losing track of the humility and the self-critical edge that attend the thought that I am not now and will never be perfect, but I can still work toward perfection.
The version of this perfectionist ethos that I know best runs most famously through the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, where, some people argue, it informs the best of American culture. How much it in fact informs the culture is an empirical question that I’m not competent to answer. But I can say that familiar touchstones of American democratic life recommend a kind of perfectionism.
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For most people, the word “perfectionism” probably names an unhealthy psychological tendency. A perfectionist in this sense needs, yearns, to be totally unimpeachable. For a person so afflicted, failure is something to be lamented and eradicated, not an occasion for learning or growth. For some scholars, “perfectionism” also names an approach to political organization. The idea here is that politics is about actively promoting the good life rather than, as liberalism standardly has it, preserving the neutral space in which each person can pursue their own good in their own way. Like the psychology of excessive striving, political perfectionism also requires handling with care, if not outright rejection. Whenever someone with an army tells you what your life is about and regards any dissent or questioning as insubordination or error, keep an eye on your purse (or your voter-registration card, or your passport).
The Perfecting Church stood for something distinct from both of these ideas. It explicitly rejected the psychology of excessive striving, which is openly at odds with the thought that God loves the imperfect but sincere believer. And it made no attempt to conscript the state into its soul-building ministries. The church leaders largely steered clear of politics and left to Caesar what was Caesar’s.
A vibrant and healthy democratic society requires a secular, ethical, democratic analogue to the Perfecting Church’s ethos. Democratic perfectionism is distinct from both modes of perfectionism noted above: it is not about the psychology of excessive striving or the politics of centralized life plans. It concerns, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer and the condemner of every success.” It concerns the fact that “every action admits of being outdone,” and that “life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn.”
I first learned to think about perfectionism from the late Stanley Cavell, who portrayed it as cutting across the usual lines that philosophers draw when they study ethics. It is, he said, “not a competing theory of the moral life, but something like a dimension or tradition of the moral life that spans the course of Western thought and concerns what used to be called the state of one’s soul.” What defines this tradition is an insistence on the cultivation of character and an emphasis on the burdens and opportunities of self-creation. These two elements together pull against overly abstract, overly static, rule-bound approaches to ethical life. Sometimes I think of perfectionism in connection with William James, who wrote that the highest ethical life consists in breaking rules that have grown too narrow for the case at hand. More often I think of John Dewey, who wrote that the real question of ethics is simply this: What kind of person will I be?
Ideas about rights, virtues and justice, about the nature of moral judgment, political authority and cultural recognition—all these and more are resources for answering Dewey’s question. But the perfectionist puts these resources to their best use by wearing a commitment to them, and to the self that is committed to them, like a loose garment. The self and its commitments are all grist for the mill of self-excavation and self-criticism, which may allow for higher and better ways of holding these commitments and imagining this self.
Thinking of the self as something to be perfected, even if ultimate and final perfection is not in the offing, is a way of raising the stakes beyond self-improvement. The aim is not incremental improvement, though that is valuable. The aim is to set a momentous agenda for a life of constructive self-interrogation, then to engage in the serious effort and passionate conviction that is called forth by that momentous aim. Perfection, however unattainable, is the heavenly mark that galvanizes the self—the fallible, humble, but aspiring self that can, despite itself, come to regard goodness and right as cold and lifeless abstractions.
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What does all this have to do with democracy? It may seem odd to link the idea of perfection, interpreted as generously or creatively as you like, with a political form that towering figures in political thought and practice have often described as profoundly imperfect. Aristotle and Plato were famously dubious about democracy’s prospects. Churchill, perhaps more famously, called it the worst form of government except for all the others.
It might seem even odder to think that perfectionism could have anything to do with American democracy now, as the republic appears to teeter on the brink of collapse. One might think that our current crises are the result of the excesses of democracy, of politicians pandering to the masses for votes instead of leading with integrity and principle. Or that they are the inevitable outgrowths of a culture that prizes the mass production of satisfaction over the difficult pursuit of rare excellence. In these and other ways, one might worry that a political form rooted in leveling, in prioritizing the standing preferences of the demos over the enlightened ambitions of their betters—the well-born, the better-informed, the conscious revolutionary, whomever—has no room, has no resources, for Emersonian flights of fancy.
As it happens, there are other ways of thinking about democracy, ways that run through Emerson and Dewey to people like Catholic activist Dorothy Day; activist-organizer-theoreticians like Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker and Bob Moses; and political theorist Sheldon Wolin. For these figures, it matters that ordinary people are still moral persons, carrying the worth that attaches to us all. It matters also that elites are still just people, limited in their sagacity, whatever their education or upbringing, by the boundaries of their own assumptions and experiences. These figures start with a faith in the capacities of ordinary people and an abiding suspicion that elites in government, when detached from ordinary people and their attempts to weather the storms of social change, will not reliably govern either justly or well.
Thinking of democracy in this way puts the prospect of perfectionism back on the table. On this approach, democracy is a political orientation that cycles through various forms and institutions in an ongoing struggle to manage the forces that shape the lives of ordinary people. It is not reducible to “first past the post” elections, or to the two-party system, or to any of the familiar institutional features of our current attempts at democratic life. It is not rooted in a grudging attempt to accommodate the needs of the benighted masses solely to win their consent to hold office. It is rooted in the sense that the masses are people, in the commitment to honoring and cultivating their capacities for self-government, and in the determination to recruit their insights into the ever-evolving conditions of their own lives into a shared project of world-building and social amelioration. If this problem-solving dynamism is what democracy means and requires, then an Emersonian perfectionism is not just available: it is essential.
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It may appear that I am loading the dice. One needn’t think of democracy in this manner. And if perfectionism depends on this way of thinking, then how should it, how can it, bear on the thinking of people who have different ideas?
If I were trying to justify a perfectionist approach to democratic life, or a democratic approach to political life, building either up from the foundations, then yes, I would have to provide much more in the way of grounding than I have so far, using many more words than I have room for. But this is an invitation, not a justification. It is a sketch for an experimental design. We Americans have already launched an experiment with something we call democracy, and many of us routinely act as if we believe that this word means the kinds of things that the figures named above thought it meant. If we do in fact believe this, then we are well on the way to having committed ourselves to a kind of perfectionist ethos. I propose simply to say what this means.
If, on the other hand, one either no longer believes in the capacities of ordinary people or never did, then the story I mean to tell will lose some of its resonance. It should still have some appeal, for reasons I’ll come to. But if one thinks of the people as sheep, fit only to be herded by experts or sacrificed to the whims and appetites of Great Men, rather than as partners in the work of building and rebuilding a shared life, then perfectionism and democracy will point in rather different directions. To a point, anyway.
Perfectionism does not proceed from any particular political ideology or approach. It is not reducible to liberalism or progressivism, conservatism or socialism, right or left. It does not depend on or entail any particular account of the good life or any suite of policy tools or electoral strategies. It is, instead, a way of asking, and of reminding one to ask, what politics and policy are for, and what our political lives and communities are about. Perfectionism does not, for example, tell the egalitarian whether to pursue equality of result or of opportunity. Nor does it tell the revolutionary whether to embrace or refuse violence. It counsels a way of exploring these questions. More than this, it enjoins us to ask what kind of people we need to be to ask and answer these questions, and to do so responsibly and with integrity.
All that said, I am interested in a specifically democratic form of perfectionism. I regard it as a resource for extending and reinventing an American experiment in crisis. Emerson’s “flying Perfect,” inspiring and condemning every success, is an apt image for the kind of democracy that America’s most thoughtful critics have pushed it to achieve. The thought that all men were created equal has had its measure of success. It has inspired much of whatever recommends the idea of America to those who value it. But the same thought, wielded by the children of slaves, by the suffragettes, and by many others—Baker, King, Moses, Day—whose equality the founders could hardly imagine, condemns much of the reality that grew up in the shade of that thought. One way to condemn is to repudiate and reject. But another way, the perfectionist way, is to renew and reinvent, on the theory that there is something here to build on, something to extend, something to perfect.
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I say that perfectionism and democracy diverge only to a point because a sincere perfectionism in this moment will have a great deal to offer across the ideological spectrum. The sense that things are dire is widely shared. For example, some of us are horrified at what President Trump and his allies have done and promise to do to the social world we once knew. But sincere adherents to that movement are themselves horrified by much of what this world has already become. They regard the quest for American greatness as an urgent exercise—one might say a crusade—of sufficient weight to justify storming the Capitol (and doing much else). For them as for people like me, something important teeters on the brink of collapse.
This pan-partisan catholicity of concern is precisely why it is important to consider the prospects for an ethical, democratic perfectionism. Trump’s coalition proposes to address the crisis of American life by demolishing much of the infrastructure of that life. It is easy enough to give this proposal a perfectionist tinge. A latter-day Emerson might recommend clearing away the accumulated dead wood of the deep-state bureaucracy (and of our civil rights jurisprudence, and of the higher-education sector, and so on) so that new ideas and approaches can blossom into view like flowers in the spring. Emerson says, “The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such.” This is close to saying that the program for restoring American greatness only strikes terror in those who resist and resent necessary change. But consider the distance between this vision for casting away American carnage and James Baldwin’s invitation in The Fire Next Time. As the Sixties brought to a head the contradictions of a democratic republic built on slaveholding and genocidal expropriation, Baldwin found these words:
Set aside Baldwin’s standard willingness to write as if blacks and whites are the only actors in America’s racial dramas. Focus instead on his appeal to growth, to creating the consciousness of the others with whom we share this social world in a spirit of loving correction. Compare this with Trump’s insistence on retribution against enemies with inherent incapacities. And then think of the way this rhetoric fuels a campaign of deliberate and theatrically exaggerated cruelty and bellicosity, all rooted in the assumption, the conviction, that he is the infallible (or, at any rate, unquestionable) arbiter of all good and right.
What would a political culture committed to perfectionist self-criticism make of Trump’s obsession with American greatness? It might concede that greatness could mean breaking the fetters of bureaucracy in the name of manly vigor and creative destruction, and that this could require bringing independent agencies to heel and grinding cabinet agencies to dust. But it might then ask: Is this all greatness can be? Is there a wider circle to draw around this one? What if something greater awaits the recognition that government agencies, at their best, are force multipliers, making it possible for humans acting in concert to do things—and do them carefully, soberly, intelligently—that isolated individuals, no matter how wealthy or self-assured, cannot do?
Perhaps greatness means summoning the resolve to question all received wisdom, and rejecting the settled judgments of experts in climate science and public health is a mark of intellectual self-reliance. But what if something greater awaits the realization that truth-seeking is a joint project, not settled by individual fiat of the great leader or the intuitions of the anti-establishment reactionary? What if something greater awaits the recognition that structured, collective inquiry—call this “science”—is a way of going beyond the individual self, of growing, of expanding one’s capacities to face life’s challenges? Consider, on the one hand, the careful accumulation and interrogation of data by many people over many years, leading to a plan for the successful eradication of a disease that has burdened human life since time immemorial. Consider, on the other hand, the rapid and unevenly scheduled disassembly of the mechanisms for gathering this data, for making these plans and for saving these lives, to replace them with worse than nothing. Which speaks more eloquently to humanity’s prospects for greatness?
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Whatever perfectionism can offer to members of Trump’s coalition, it interests me most as a resource for some of his opponents, or as a marker of how manifestly and completely they have failed to meet the moment. The leaders of the Democratic Party seem to equate democracy with the techniques of policy design, fundraising and strategic communications. Even after several cycles of electoral failure and despite mountains of data showing their declining purchase on the hearts and minds of actual and potential voters, the Democrats’ posture may be as distant from Baldwin’s invitation to ethical growth and loving correction as the MAGA movement is.
The cautious repose of the erstwhile opposition represents a great many things, but I offer it here as an example of an underdeveloped capacity for transformative self-criticism. The leaders of the Democratic Party seem truly incapable of deep self-interrogation. Questioning the assumptions that animate their incremental shifts in strategy seems unthinkable, even when their technical recalibrations fail, and fail again.
One measure of this failure is the inability to receive suggestions and criticisms from more left-leaning elements of the party—to say nothing of critiques from the actual left that lives outside the party, among differently affiliated democratic socialists and others. Party leaders—party elders, I feel compelled to say—treat recommendations for change like the rantings of insubordinate children, or like encroachments on a terrain that they occupy by divine right. The recommendations might be wrong, or ill-conceived. But that seems like a matter to be decided by sober reflection, not assumed a priori. Why not treat these suggestions as contributions to a joint project that has failed to keep pace with evolving social conditions? Why not consider that there are other circles to draw around the narrow and shrinking circle of clientelist political triangulation?
Another measure of this failure, one that overlaps somewhat with the first, is the national party leadership’s indifference to the wellsprings of civic energy waiting to be tapped in local settings all over the country. Local activists and leaders—at the state and municipal levels; in party leadership and elsewhere—are drawing new circles, in Emerson’s sense. Some of them, as in Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign for the mayoralty of New York City, are doing this on the strength of ideas and techniques from far outside the box of standard-issue democratic politics. Others have no interest in ideologies like democratic socialism, and could, if given the chance, offer the national party some fairly straightforward ways to link its traditional aims and messaging to the challenges that shape the lives of everyday people, and to the energies that people bring to bear in facing those challenges. But these local actors are—I would say, and the ones I know about would agree with me—too rarely drawing the attention of leadership. When they do win the spotlight, it is often because the national organization feels compelled to anoint its own local standard-bearer, however comically flawed or indistinguishable from the Republican opposition, to prevent the organically generated local candidate from upsetting some distant apple cart.
I say this not as a member of the party but as a member of a massive but inchoate coalition that the Democrats seem determined not to activate or leverage. Our political system makes it imperative to work, for many purposes, through one of the established parties. Trump’s party has given itself fully to forces that are determined to abolish the vision of America that I’ve allowed myself to hope for, a vision like the one that I attributed above to Baker and Moses and King. Chuck Schumer’s party gives lip service to at least some aspects of that vision and has some history of speaking to and for the people who share my interest in it. I don’t trust the Democratic Party as it stands, nor do I have faith or confidence in it. But it is, for me, the only reasonable repository of political hope at scale in this moment.
None of this is to suggest that either left politics or local affiliations are any guarantee of ethical integrity, effective policy or successful politics. Irrespective of party affiliation, sphere of influence or ideological conviction, those who take it upon themselves to do the work of democratic politics must contend with the kinds of dangers and temptations noted above—the seductions of charismatic leadership, the temptations of technocratic expertise and so on. For all of them, if they take democracy seriously, questioning and criticism must inform retail efforts to engage and mobilize people on the ground. One key to doing this is to join these people in regarding their lives as more than cost-benefit analyses and survey results. Their lives are their lives, with human stakes and meanings, ennobled by ambitions and shadowed by disappointments. A successful politics must speak to this dimension of human striving, especially in times of rapid and far-reaching change.
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We never actually joined the Perfecting Church. My family and I hovered on its margins but were never able to commit fully. Filing past dormant popcorn machines dampened my spiritual ardor; the weekly sermons sped too swiftly over theological puzzles and cared too little for preacherly eloquence. The church never felt like church.
I did briefly join the Democratic Party, long ago. But I left soon after, and have never felt compelled to reconsider that decision. The leadership throws lavish conventions and sends innumerable text solicitations and gathers and spends a lot of money. But their vision of democracy rarely feels like more than a series of genuflections to established structures and authorities.
A perfectionist orientation to democracy can stand as a reminder that political life is more than the forms it calls forth. A society’s commitment to democracy outruns and outlives and exceeds its characteristic institutions as surely as the life of a vibrant church reaches beyond the building that houses it. Even the iconoclasts among us, those of us who bristle at the compromises of teamwork and find ourselves undone by the inevitable disappointments of human relatedness, can find a role to play in the perfectionist renewal of democratic life. Because this renewal requires critique and questioning and creative reinvention, all of which can give even the most solitary artists, scholars and writers a role to play. We need only accept some version of the thought that we are all woven into a single garment of destiny, or, put differently, that I am because we are.
Perhaps the main payoff of democratic perfectionism is that it offers a reminder about this aspirational and, in a way, spiritual dimension of political life. To cite a late sermon of the great Gardner Taylor: “There is something wrong with people who are so hardened that nothing makes them gasp, nothing makes something of awe stir in them.” To think of our democracy as something worthy of perfecting—not just as something to improve or refine or furnish with more efficacious policies, but to perfect—is to reach for something awe-inspiring in the human condition. A democratic politics worthy of the name must speak to this dimension of our shared lives, and should continually steel its attempts to do so against the shifting winds that blow against it.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.