Notes on Democracy

Democracy came into the Western World to the tune of sweet soft music. There was at the start no harsh bawling from below there was only a dulcet twittering from above. Democratic man thus began as an ideal being full of ineffable virtues and romantic wrongs in brief as Rousseaus noble savage in smock and jerkin brought out of the tropical wilds to shame the lords and masters of the civilized lands. The fact continues to have important consequences to this day. It remains impossible as it was in the eighteenth century to separate the democratic idea from the theory that there is a mystical merit an esoteric and ineradicable rectitude in the man at the bottom of the scalethat inferiority by some strange magic becomes a sort of superioritynay the superiority of superiorities.