On Democracy

What it means for politics, what it means for art

I’m working my way through a galley of

becca rothfeld

’s upcoming book All Things Are Too Small, which you should all pre-order immediately. I won’t be reviewing it anywhere because Becca is a current friend and I have some sense of professional ethics, but it’s almost certainly one of the best nonfiction books you’ll read in 2024.

One of the through-lines in Becca’s thought is the relationship between politics and art. She totally rejects evaluating art on political criteria because those kinds of evaluations make for bad art, a position with which I wholeheartedly agree. She also notes that we frequently confuse the means and ends of political liberalism (which, as she reminds us, is not laissez-faire economics but the contention that there should exist a sphere of private life in which people may pursue their vision of the good without significant interference from the state), and that a “neutral public sphere” does not and should not mean a neutral and featureless public life, but rather one in which we encounter all manner of human variety. We pursue a certain kind of neutrality in order to better enable people to flourish in whatever ways suit the talents and disposition of each.

So too with democracy, which is well suited to the political life and dignity of human beings but can fare poorly when transplanted into other spheres. What does it mean, for example, to democratize education? It seems to me that real democracy in education means the extension to each person of the same fundamental right of participation in educational institutions that we affirm in political institutions. It means educating each person to the fullest extent that their abilities and desire permit. It does not mean offering “free choice” as if we were stocking a supermarket, and it does not mean letting state legislatures stick their noses into it like dogs let loose in a restaurant kitchen. Least of all does it mean transplanting the mechanisms of political democracy—elections, impeachments, legislative sessions—into the classroom or the curriculum. The point of education is to move us from ignorance to knowledge in important subjects and to inculcate the intellectual and social habits that will allow us to continue thinking and learning for our entire lives; the structures suited to this purpose are not necessarily the same as those we use in political governance.

And what does it mean to democratize art? One popular answer is that it means making art accessible. This is complicated by the multiple meanings of “accessibility,” a word that is much abused in the modern university. In its narrowest and most straightforward sense, it refers to structures and accommodations designed to allow disabled people to participate fully in public life; failure to make institutions accessible in this sense is a serious matter, as it harms people’s political dignity. There is another, looser sense of “accessible” that means “readily comprehensible with minimal assistance,” and this is the sense that is usually abused through attempts to conflate it with the narrower one. Assigning a text that a student cannot read because they are blind to some degree (and failing to provide a version that they can read) is a moral wrong; assigning a text that is intellectually or artistically difficult might be an error in judgment, but it may also be the right move, and in any case it is not any kind of serious harm.

One of the stronger currents in American literary and pedagogical discussions, however, seems determined to conflate these things. My middle school years were pretty self-consciously a time when our teachers took us from reading books written for children to the kinds of books that adults read and re-read throughout their lives. Now, of course, the boundary has collapsed and the biggest-selling adult book category is books ostensibly written for children, and the publicity apparatus for the industry is extremely invested in convincing both its authors and its readers that preferring multilayered aesthetic experiences to something whose advertising copy is just a multicolored list of phrases from TVTropes dot com is both politically and morally suspect. And once one entertains this idea, then seeking to cultivate young people’s capacity to enjoy grown-up literature becomes almost unthinkable, and indeed I have seen and heard teachers contend that we have no right to ask students even to read complete books, let alone difficult ones. Why, after all, should they enter into uncharted alterity when the marketing department has already vetted so many perfectly acceptable options? This is in fact a profoundly undemocratic sentiment: it mistakes means for ends and fails to see that cultivating human capacity makes us more free and more human. That this attempt has sometimes failed is probably some kind of indictment, but that we have begun thinking it is not worth attempting is incomparably worse.

Political democracy is just not a very good measuring stick for art; in fact, it’s much the other way around. We have political democracy precisely for the sake of art: we want full public dignity precisely so that people can live lives above and beyond mere animal necessity. The fullness of human life consists precisely in what is not necessary: that is where we most fully express the divine image that we bear. There was (or is, depending on your perspective) no shadow of necessity in God’s act of creation, no lack in God which is filled by the world. In this sense the entire order of things, ourselves included, is gratuity piled on splendid gratuity: none of it necessary, all of it beautiful.

Art is unnecessary, and it is also indispensable. Helen DeWitt dramatizes this spectacularly in The Last Samurai, which I still believe to be the finest Anglophone novel of the 21st century. One of her protagonists, Sibylla, is a woman with tremendously developed intellectual and aesthetic faculties reduced to spending nearly all of her time securing animal necessities—food, shelter, heating—for herself and her young son. She spends much of the novel contemplating suicide, because she is even more acutely aware than most of the inhumanity that has been imposed on her by a society that is not actually ordered around human capacities at all. She loves art, but the kind of art she most enjoys is not profitable and so nobody makes it. She has “access” in the sense of having had an education that prepared her to walk through any museum in the world, but there is no material access to the kind of art that makes her life worth living.

And that kind of access—substantive access, the ability to actually go and enjoy museums and galleries and performances—is the only meaningful sense in which we can speak of democratizing art. Symphony orchestras will probably never turn a profit, but they could reach far more people if going to the symphony were a $12 proposition instead of a $60 one. I saw a production of Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment at the Chicago Lyric Opera this past weekend that a great many people could have enjoyed—the opera is quite funny, Lisette Oropesa sang marvelously, and Lawrence Brownlee managed only two near-disasters in the famous tenor aria with the nine high Cs—but my nosebleed seats were $62 apiece. I love the opera and was happy to pay, but how are you going to convince someone who isn’t sure? For that matter, how are you going to convince someone who loves listening to operas on Spotify but is barely making rent? Museums seem to have some sense of public mission, but quality performing arts are effectively closed to anybody who can’t afford at least $50 tickets. There is no reason it has to be this way: European state subsidy programs make it possible to go to the opera, the symphony, and the theatre for the price of a meal at Subway. Audiences, in turn, are more willing to try art that’s new and untested because they aren’t tossing a week of groceries at it. But this isn’t just about economic efficiency: this is why we have societies at all. The entire point of this multi-thousand-year clusterfuck is to try to share and minimize the work of securing necessities so that we can share and maximize the things we like, the things that aren’t going to put food on the table but instead exist for their own sake.

Look, not everyone is going to enjoy everything. Indeed, not everyone can enjoy everything: whether by capacity or disposition, we are all barred from some media or genres of art. But this only underscores the point: everyone is going to exercise and develop their capacity for unnecessary things differently, so a regime of broad and substantive access to art is the only humane option. This is, of course, a pretty radical line of thought once you embark on it. Some books or films can only be enjoyed through patient study, so obviously we need to afford everyone enough time for that study; poetry is notoriously untranslatable, so we must ensure that anyone who wants to learn a language has the time and means to do so; travel is expensive and time-consuming, so professional-quality theatres and music ensembles should be supported for every area large enough to have its own schools. Democratizing art turns out to mean always asking for more, always inviting people to come further, reminding them that they exist for joy. It means adhering rigorously to the idea that the main social purpose of the Hershey candy company is to ensure that my blood sugar doesn’t tank during the second intermission of Aida. These are fringe ideas in the United States today. But political life is about realizing a vision of the good together; we must believe it can be made better. We must always believe that we, and everyone we meet, are capable of more.