Politics

To track the meaning of American democracy through The Atlantic's archives is to be reminded how slippery, but strong, it has always been. No one, of course, rejects the principle trumpeted by Ralph Waldo Emerson at the outset of these selections that “Emancipation is the demand of civilization.” (What American would go on record trashing freedom?) But succeeding thinkers voice unease about just how to put it into action.

Woodrow Wilson wonders if democratic government, as established, can cope with entropic times, when “voters of every blood and environment and social derivation mix and stare at one another at the same voting places.” Walter Lippmann sniffs at “the prevailing public opinion,” worrying over how to strengthen “the judgments of informed and responsible officials.” But both men were writing when, from our standpoint, civilization’s demand for emancipation had not remotely been met. Wilson wrote when women had not yet gotten the ...