Democracy’s future not assured
By the time the writer Thomas Mann left Germany in 1933, democracy in that country was a bygone thing. When he reached the United States in 1938, after years of exile in Europe, the world was on the brink of World War II, pushed there by German nationalism gone crazy under the direction of its mad Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler.
That same year Mann, the author of “The Magic Mountain” and “Death in Venice,” launched a lecture series across this country. Late in 1938, the published record of Mann’s lectures appeared.
Mann called his new book “The Coming Victory of Democracy.” It was an audacious title, precisely because so many people were embracing – while others were conceding – the coming victory of arbitrary power wielded by governments hostile to human rights and the rule of law.
“America needs no instruction on the things that concern democracy,” Mann wrote with flattering regard for American sensibilities, although the fact that he felt the need to speak and write on the subject suggests, deep in his heart, that perhaps he thought otherwise.
“No worthwhile thing can be neglected,” Mann continued. “Throughout the world it has become precarious to take democracy for granted…. Even America feels today that democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and without….”
Fascism somehow seemed fresh and new in a world weary of economic uncertainty and the inability, in America at least, of democracy to end the suffering of the Great Depression. (Unemployment in the United States was still unacceptably high in late 1938, before the defense production boom got under way which eventually thrust the U.S. into the role of “the arsenal of democracy.”
Fascism had the allure of being different, he said. The “charm of novelty” was one of its selling points. “Fascism is a child of the time,” Mann wrote.
“Yet democracy is timelessly human,” Mann insisted, making it infinitely superior to fascism.
One-man authoritarian government, “opposed to truth, hostile to freedom, and lacking in justice, acts in so low and contemptible a manner because it is devoid of [human] feeling and understanding….”
During World War II, Mann recorded speeches on the BBC for broadcast to the German people. In one speech, the author noted, only half humorously, that Hitler’s preoccupation with the war happily prevented him from making speeches about German culture.
In his 1938 essay on democracy, Mann said that democracy implies “justice.” Two other words for “justice” were “freedom” and “truth,” according to Mann, who added, “It is impossible to decide which should take precedent…. For each expresses the idea [of democracy] in its totality, and one stands for the other.”
Mann, who remained in the United States until early in the 1950s, when he moved to Switzerland, was not foolishly optimistic; he was not a utopian intellectual, a pie-in-the-sky thinker. “The bitter, harsh everyday truth,” he said, was that humankind’s “egoism, its deceitfulness, cowardness, [and] its anti-social instincts” were all too frequently the sum and substance of life.
“Despite so much ridiculous depravity” in the world, Mann insisted that “we cannot forget” that men and women elevate themselves and others in the arts and sciences, in their “passion for truth, the creation of beauty, and in the idea of justice,” and, as the social critic David Brooks has said, in being worthy neighbors and friends, and active for good in their communities.
Evil happens with “the release of stupidity” and escape from the “discipline of reason and intelligence,” Mann wrote in “The Coming Victory of Democracy.”
Democracy needs to be nurtured, always. As Mann put it in 1938, Americans “should put aside the habit of taking [democracy] for granted.” Instead, they should take “the opportunity to renew and rejuvenate” it.
Democracy is voting, but it’s a whole lot more. It’s a way of life, a way of behaving. As defined by Mann and others, it means respecting the dignity of each individual, regardless of their circumstance. A democratically-imbued people look out for one another, respect one another, and recall, with earnest delight, that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the founding principles of the Republic.
It’s impossible to live as an American while rejecting the country’s democratic core.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.