Democracy Based Off of Walt Whitman's Writing

“...The present is but the legitimate birth of the past.” -- Walt Whitman

Democracy in the American government was put in place by our founding fathers.  Much can be learned from the past about how democracy has both positively and negatively affected our nation.  America is able to keep a democratic government from going completely corrupt because it looked back on the past and discovered where the democracy went array.  We can learn from our past, and that is why America is a democratic republic: so far, it seems to have worked well for the nation as a whole. 

Democracy is based upon the idea that We the People matter because in the end we have the final say. It both separates and unites the American people, but requires that there is political equality between all citizens. The downside is that America possesses a tyranny of the majority; those who fall in the minority just have to stand by as policies that they are against get put into effect.  To help this, the government has a separation of powers among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

Within democracy, the judgment of the wise is subordinated to the prejudices of the ignorant. The question of who should really get to vote gets raised.  Should proportional representation and extra votes for the better-educated exist?  And will the majority poor citizenry vote for confiscatory legislation at the expense of the rich minority?  The debate is whether the government should do something to control these problems, or just let the democracy run itself and take into account each person’s vote. 

  In hope that democracy will succeed in making the nation prosper, the American people have put their dreams and freedom in the the hands of democracy.  Yet, democracy is freedom: it allows each individual to take as much of a hold on their freedom as they wish. Though democracy calls for freedom being the ultimate goal to preserve a peaceful togetherness, the harsh reality is that individuals and opinions are abundant and varied, and no one will ever agree.  Therefore, a true democracy is not possible as long as people crave to have more wealth, more money, and more of everything; no one will ever completely agree on everything.  This is why America has a democratic republic. We have representatives who take our votes into account, but they get to make the final decisions on policies and who is elected.  

Democracy is present in our everyday lives because in each of our encounters, we have the equal opportunity to be heard. We are able to inform those who are authoritative to us about public problems, and possibly work together to solve those. We have the freedom to do what we want, write what we want, say what we want.  It was Walt Whitman who noted, “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.”  Historians, teachers, professors, and many others, have studied and put democracy into its own form. Whitman writes,“the problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature” (760). This has caused it to become better understood in the American culture, and therefore it is deemed a more successful part of government.  Democracy has been shaped by the American people because we have looked back on what has been produced by democracy in the past, and each individual has an opinion on where democracy should go from this point.  This has allowed democracy to get molded to the American culture. 

There is no true democracy in America, but the democracy we do have causes us to anticipate the future in hope that each new day will be better and that the nation will move towards fixing the problems that are currently present.  The definition of democracy will perhaps vary for each American citizen, because as long as each individual holds his or her own opinion, the possibilities of policies and elected leaders will be vast.  By looking at America’s past, it has been established that America’s liberty and democracy has flourished in America and how it differed from the normal progressions of other nations, and this is why democracy has stayed a part of the United States’ government.