Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy.

Robert H. Wiebe University of Chicago Press, $25.95, 321 pp.

Democracy is much on the minds of contemporary intellectuals. Jean Bethke Elshtain thinks it is "on trial." The late Christopher Lasch wondered if Americans deserve it. Republican thinkers, having won the last election, find no particular flaws with it. Yet as Robert Wiebe argues in his enlightening must-read, almost no one has a clear conception of what democracy is. Wiebe offers a narrative of democracy's "cultural history," an account of how our predecessors understood what democracy meant to them. American democracy began for white males only. Unruly, often violent, and certainly noisy elections bore little relationship to the well-financed, low-turn-out campaigns of today. Wiebe's account of early American experiences with democracy is wonderful. Only in this country was the idea taken seriously that no one other than the individual in question owned a rightful claim to a particular person's labor. Despite slavery and the exclusion of women, the equality spawned by America's lack of feudalism spilled over into every place in which white men came together: local political clubs, neighborhoods, saloons, sporting events. Democracy, Wiebe argues, built America. What contemporary Europeans did not like about it--"its diffusion of responsibility, its resistance to institutionalized power, its blanketing of the nation"--is what made it so valuable.

As America matured, democracy expanded and contracted simultaneously. The positive side of the story is well-known. The Civil War amendments broke the legal status of slavery, and, after a disgracefully long time, racial discrimination in voting came to an end. Women eventually obtained the right to vote, although, in Wiebe's account, it took the shame of being the only mature country in the world without women's suffrage before the United States took that step. In a formal sense, twentieth-century America was far more "democratic" than the America of the previous centuries.

But Wiebe also describes how, as the groups that participated in democracy expanded, the meaning of democracy thinned out. Progressives cleaned up the noises and dirt of elections, but left in place a class society in which the less respectable were subtly encouraged not to participate. Meanwhile, at the top of society, a national elite came into being, undermining local middle classes. Administration replaced politics. Hierarchies appeared everywhere. Cynics such as Walter Lippmann argued that democracy, understood as self-rule, was impossible. The result was "the disappearance of the People, the ultimate expression of nineteenth-century self-government that in the culture of America's original democracy spoke through general elections to make broad policy determinations."

The story of modern democracy is the story of the state. Government came to pervade all areas of American life, but, as Wiebe describes it, the process was uneven and contradictory. The New Deal was not simply an expansion of national power: it represented, rather, a compromise between national elites and local middle classes, one that only broke down forty years later. At the same time, the expansion of government was accompanied by an expansion of rights against the government. Individualism and majoritarianism were at war with each other, and liberals wanted both. But the overall outcome was never in doubt: "In the nineteenth century, democracy shaped the state; in the twentieth the state shaped democracy."

Democracy, Wiebe concludes, is not currently strong enough to resolve the demands upon it. "Anyone seeking a political solution to complicated social questions soon learned how poorly a weakened electoral democracy served to resolve distributional issues of any sort...." Or, as Wiebe succinctly puts it: "limits at every turn." American democracy, which began with tumultuous energy, is now moribund; it will only be revived if "the centralized, hierarchical structure of relations that first took shape in the 1890s and the 1920s, a structure that resists popular participation and at the least operates in tension with individualist democracy" is significantly abolished.

Wiebe is aware that a cultural history of democracy can help put into context current debates about whether America suffers from too much democracy--or too little. Wiebe has no doubts about the answer. A passionate democrat himself, he clearly would prefer a system which combined the deep participation of white male democracy with the inclusiveness of its twentieth-century version. Yet there is a way in which his history and his advocacy work at cross purposes. For Wiebe's ideal democracy is one that, in fact, did not occur. As a democrat, he is disappointed. But as a historian, he owes us an explanation.

There is at least one possible explanation for the thinness of democracy, and it is one that Wiebe's political commitments will not allow him to accept. An uninspiring democracy could simply be what a democratic people have democratically chosen. Democracy is inherently more passionate when it is more restricted; the stakes are higher, the injustice of exclusion more stark, the ability to mobilize more compelling. For the same reasons, if in reverse, a democracy that has become more inclusive will also lose its righteous indignation. It could even happen that democracy would result in the election of leaders poised to restrict democracy. One simply has to accept that democracy is a process that cannot presuppose an outcome.

Yet at times Wiebe seems to be arguing that democracy is not genuine unless a substantive outcome results. He cites, for example, Ian Shapiro's argument that democracy is inevitably tied to "an ethic of opposition." "Democracy," Wiebe continues in his own voice, "is always a superior power, never a vulnerable citizen. In no case does it have a stake in personal humiliation."

I am in full accord with Wiebe's personal values on this point, but I wonder if he has not come uncomfortably close to defining democracy as the fulfillment of the goals of the Left. If so, he runs the risk of being no different from the progressive reformers he so effectively criticizes. For what if Americans do not want the politics of the Left? They have, after all, been fairly clear in recent elections that they want more Republicans and conservatives. Does a democrat tell them they can't have them? One of the few significant weaknesses in Self-Rule is the lack of attention paid to the fact that, whatever intellectuals think, most Americans are translating their unhappiness with democracy into support for the Right.

Wiebe's historical treatment of democracy is so engaging because it is so realistic. He evokes the nitty-gritty of democracy, the way it feels in the streets and in the lodges. Democracy comes alive in his book because it is not tied to an abstract theory of how the world ought to work but a finely grained sociological description of how it did. This is what makes his conclusion seem awkward. For as an advocate, rather than as a historian, Wiebe is more romantic than realist, urging what should happen rather than what did. The closer his account comes to the present, the less convincing it is.

Despite this one flaw, Self-Rule is a brilliantly written, stunningly energetic, and wide-ranging account of what America used to be like. Whether or not our history can help us now--Wiebe is far more confident on this point than I would be--this book is bound to give the public discussion over the future of democracy far more grounding than it currently has.