Jean Bethke Elshtain

When Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Democracy on Trial appeared in 1995, it attracted great attention because it challenged the democratic triumphalism that still prevailed in the United States in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dramatic expansion of democracy around the world. The book’s central message was that, while the threat to democracy from without had diminished, the threat from within had grown more acute. Democracy was vulnerable to a variety of internal crises—a weakening of democratic civil society; the disintegration of the family and other social webs that had once helped to morally ground individuals and prepare them for democratic citizenship; the rise of political cynicism and even despair; and a societal vacuum that was being filled by an increasingly ubiquitous state.

If Democracy on Trial was a fire bell in a night of pervasive complacency, today we no longer feel so confident and invulnerable. The 2008 financial crisis in the U.S., the worst since the Great Depression, has been followed by a protracted period of sluggish economic growth. Even more worrisome has been a deepening crisis of governance marked by paralyzing political polarization and a loss of confidence in the U.S. capacity to solve its internal problems and provide leadership in an increasingly unstable world. Matters are even worse in Europe, where populist parties of the left and right are gaining strength and the Greek bailout crisis has highlighted the danger of growing debt in relation to output, a problem that is compounded by demographic trends that are shifting unfavorably the ratio of workers to pensioners. Elsewhere in the world, the rising power of China, Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and its threat to countries on its periphery, and the rise of ISIS in the Middle East and Iran’s growing influence all point to a shift in power globally away from the U.S. and Europe, democracy’s traditional heartland, and raise questions about the future of democratic civilization.

Such trends are not unrelated to the decline of citizenship and moral responsibility that Elshtain first identified in Democracy on Trial. Her worry two decades ago that “America’s position in the world will falter” as a result of its trials of democracy at home now seems prophetic (DT, 37). Elshtain was an integrative thinker, a public intellectual who tried to explain the relationship of political and economic crises to underlying intellectual and moral trends that affect the capacity of democratic societies to act responsibly and to defend democratic values. As such, she was drawn to moral leaders like Vaclav Havel and Pope John Paul II, who were able to connect the defense of human dignity to the survival of democratic society in the face of threats from totalitarian political forces and nihilistic social movements. She was also a great admirer of thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville, who understood both the importance for democracy of both a vibrant civil society and the extent to which democratic culture needs to be rooted in religious traditions and values. Like them, she worried that the growth of secularism could erode the moral and cultural foundations of democracy.

One such thinker is Jonathan Sacks, England’s former Chief Rabbi, who has drawn special attention to the decline of religion. Following the London riots in the summer of 2011, Sacks wrote that the violence was “the bursting of a dam of potential trouble that has been building for years,” especially “the collapse of families and communities [that] leaves in its wake unsocialized young people.” He called these young people “the victims of a tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement.” The financial troubles, he added, simply grew from that failure of responsibility: “Good and otherwise sensible people were persuaded that you could spend more than you earn, incur debt at unprecedented levels and consume the world’s resources without thinking about who will pay the bill and when….We have been spending our moral capital with the same reckless abandon that we have been spending our financial capital.”

For Rabbi Sacks, the charred ruins of London neighborhoods are a symptom of a process of civilizational decay that is affecting, to one degree or another, all of the established democracies of the West. Here we have “democracy on trial,” but at a later stage of decay and in a different, much starker context. In Sacks’ view, the solution will require nothing less than “the remoralization of society,” a process that will have to be driven by a religious revival, since it is religion, he believes, that fosters “moral character, self-discipline, willpower and personal responsibility.” The loss of faith is responsible for the weakening of such attributes, according to Sacks, and only its revival will enable modern democracy to recover its strength and viability. The very existence of democracy, in other words, is tied to the reinvigoration of religious faith. While the issue of religion and its relation to democracy is a central issue in the thought of Jean Bethke Elshtain, she believes that the most important antidote to the decline of democratic values is a revival of civil society activism. In Democracy on Trial, she suggests that the restoration of democratic citizenship and a sense of community can be achieved “when men and women, acting in common as citizens, get together and find a way to express their collective hopes and possibilities” (DT, 123-4). As examples of such common actions, she celebrates the nonviolent freedom struggles of the American civil rights movement, the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, and the dissident movement led by Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia. Such struggles, she writes, provide evidence of democracy’s resilience, for democracy is “the dream dreamed by democrats everywhere” and “the great source of political hope in our troubled world” (DT, 117-8).

(excerpted from chapter 17)