Highlighting Deliberative Popular Sovereignty: A Central Valence of Democratic Politics and Freedom

Democracy as a form of governance stands or falls ultimately on the good sense or deliberative capacity of the people who are sovereign within it. Democracy trusts citizens to make choices that ensure the freedom and rights of all. If those individuals falter in exercising prudence and fall instead into quests for power over subgroups or deprive some of their fellow residents of a share of their human rights on any other basis, the freedom that democracy can otherwise ensure will soon evanesce and perhaps be lost to one or another form of tyranny.

        This challenge is real for all would-be democratic societies, but it is especially challenging for those with significant differences or heterogeneity within their populations, whether of tribe, race, skin color, religion, ethnicity, gender or other characteristics. The fundamental issue is whether human beings can continuously recognize their innate interdependence and the significance of ensuring the rights and freedom of all within their polity to preserve their own freedom. This requires recognition that they are not automatons and that their society and their lives are inevitably social in character. It also demands an openness to, and curiosity concerning, pluralism and difference rather than fear or loathing of the same. Nonetheless, history teaches that humankind has ever been willing to jettison democratic possibility and freedom in thrall to the siren call of hatred or a desire for power along any of the characteristics noted above. Thus, my rationale for calling this demos capacity and choice a central crucible of democratic politics.

        I have lately encountered two works that encouraged me to reflect on this significant valence inherent in democratic policymaking and governance. I came across the first while reading Candice Millard’s marvelous The River of Doubt, which chronicles Theodore Roosevelt’s near fatal journey of exploration into the Amazon in Brazil following his defeat in the 1912 presidential election.¹ Early in her account, she draws a picture of Roosevelt’s final major campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on October 30 before the presidential election on November 5. He knew then he was likely to lose, for he had run by creating his own political movement, The Progressive or Bull Moose Party, after he had failed to gain his own party’s nomination after becoming convinced that his protégé, the “flubdub” William Howard Taft, was not up to the job.² Woodrow Wilson was the Democratic Party nominee, and he won the election handily as Roosevelt split the Republican and Independent vote. 

        Here is how Millard described the scene at the arena as thousands gathered to hear Roosevelt speak:

Before the doors even opened, more than a hundred thousand people were swarming the sidewalks and choking the surrounding cobblestone streets. … Dollar seats went for as much as seven dollars roughly $130 in today’s money. … More than two thousand people tried to make it into the arena by bypassing the line and driving to the gate in a hired carriage or one of Henry Ford’s Model T’s.³

        The former president mesmerized the massive crowd and, choosing not to attack Wilson or Taft, he spoke instead, as Millard reported, about “character, moral strength, compassion and responsibility.”⁴ As he came to the heart of his message he thundered:

We do not set greed against greed or hatred against hatred. Our creed is one that bids us to be just to all, to feel sympathy for all, and to strive for an understanding of the needs of all. Our purpose is to smite down wrong.⁵

        In short, Roosevelt threw himself foursquare in support of a democracy whose sovereign citizens honor one another as human beings, recognize their interdependence and refuse to fall prey to power mongering, hatred or greed, all in the name of their shared freedom. He asked his supporters, and all Americans, never to imagine that their society should exist for any overarching purpose but the common pursuit of justice for all its number. In Abraham Lincoln’s famous phrase, Roosevelt appealed to “the better angels of our natures” and asked that each citizen choose prudence and sympathy in lieu of smallness and cruelty, in recognition of the imperative imposed by their pursuit of freedom and justice.⁶ These were doubtless high ideals but surely consonant with those outlined in the nation’s Declaration of Independence and just a few decades before by Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address as well.⁷

        The second piece that put me in mind of this central valence of democratic behavior was a short story I came across recently by Roald Dahl. As it happens, until that time, I knew Dahl only as the author of famous children’s stories, including Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. But he also was a serious essayist for adults, and in June 1950, he published a brief, but powerful, short story entitled “Poison” in Collier’s Magazine.⁸

        Dahl set his story in colonial era India. The main character was Harry Pope, while his friend Timber Woods narrated the account. As the story began, Timber encountered his friend Harry, in bed, motionless, sweating, and panicked. Pope explained in a whisper that a small but deadly venomous snake, a krait, had crawled onto his stomach, underneath the covers, and he asked his friend to bring a doctor to help. Timber called Dr. Ganderbai, a kindly local Indian doctor who indeed rushed to assist. The physician administered what he knew may not prove to be a helpful antidote (none certain to help existed, as the account made clear) as part of an effort to keep Harry calm. The two also worked to sedate the potentially deadly reptile with chloroform. Finally, the pair managed to turn back the sheets and did not find a snake. As Pope arose without issue, Dr. Ganderbai innocently inquired whether he was certain that there had been a snake. Harry, arguing that Ganderbai, who had just done all he could to help him, was calling him a liar, unleashed an array of degrading racial slurs at the doctor.

        The story raises the hard question of why people are willing to hate a priori, to practice othering, on whatever basis and to do so in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, or based on even preposterous conspiracy theories.  I want to argue the question is endemic to human behavior. We saw it in operation among many other examples that might be cited, at its most murderous in Rwanda in 1994, in Indonesia in 1965-66, in the Killing Fields from 1975-1979, in Stalin’s Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany. In each case, an inability or unwillingness to dignify a different seeming “other,” to accord them “sympathy” and standing in Roosevelt’s terms, was underlined by active stereotyping, scapegoating and blame casting by specific social actors for perceived electoral or other social power advantage. These are doubtless radical examples of the phenomenon, but they illustrate how wildly extreme these movements and propensities may become (and how deeply cruel humans can be). I am not arguing that every insensitive remark represents or will result in a murderous outcome. I am saying that this behavioral valence lies at the heart of democratic self-governance, whatever its specific manifestation—small or large. And without its potential proverbial fire, one could not have had the travesties I have highlighted transpire.

        Together these examples of humankind’s inhumanity suggest the vital significance of civic acculturation and education in democratic polities. By this, I mean the importance of citizens understanding the enormous responsibility that comes from the gift of sovereignty they have been accorded and the need to discipline their ever-possible avarice, callousness, cruelty and smallness in the name of the rights and freedom their self-rule can otherwise guarantee. Those allowed to govern themselves must address the duty such entails by ensuring they elect individuals of prudence willing to seek justice for all while also demanding that they themselves behave in ways that work to ensure that result. Surely these are high ideals. Just as surely, these aims can be difficult to attain in any fulsome way for once and always. But if the above examples can teach us anything today, it is the vital importance of ensuring a democratic citizenry equipped to play its signal role in preserving the possibility that freedom represents. It is a gift that can easily be lost should a majority fall prey to the a priori empty smallness and cruelty that Pope’s chauvinism and racism represented in Dahl’s story and to which Roosevelt pointed as well.

        In short, what strikes me is that there is nothing new in recounting the fact that humans are capable of both remarkable goodness and other-regardingness, and equally and seemingly limitless venality. The democratic social challenge is to discern across time how to encourage a polity of the sort Roosevelt envisioned rather than one governed by the crabbed nastiness and ignorance that Dahl represented in Pope. In perhaps indefinable measure, the choice on the valence I have sketched is, or can be, a voluntary one for the individuals charged with ensuring it in democracies, and that realization is at once bracing and frightening for it places the hope for freedom on the shoulders of citizens as its ultimate arbiters. We will continue to do our best here at the Institute to raise these questions and concerns for broad public conversation. We can and should do no less, given their centrality to the vigor of our democracy.

Notes

¹ Milard, Candice, The River of Doubt, New York: Random House, Inc., 2005.

² Millard, 12.

³ Millard, 8-9.

⁴ Millard, 11.

⁵ Millard, 11

⁶ Lincoln, Abraham, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861, Available at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp  Accessed October 18, 2025.

⁷ Lincoln, Abraham, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, Available at: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/t-06044.pdf  Accessed October 18, 2025.

⁸ Dahl, Roald. “Poison,” Collier’s Magazine, 125, (22), June 3, 1950. Available at: https://kig.hu/images/article/12776/Poisontext.pdf  Accessed on October 18, 2025.