Democracy engenders magical thinking. It suggests a world (to be) transformed. It empowers people to create and recreate the world in their own image. Nothing seems to lie beyond their demiurgic reach. Calls for freedom, justice, equality, fairness, and dignity must remain unfulfilled in its absence. In democracy, dreams can and do come true. Democracy is associated with life and its possibilities.

Ironically, democracy rarely leaves people satisfied, let alone pleased. If anything, the introduction of democracy signals the onset of new predicaments as much as the redress of prior dilemmas. Violence, exclusion, injury, sacrifice, and cruelty abound in democracy. It tends to subvert, from inception, its founding norms and principles, its fundamental goals and purposes, its own feats and creations, including when it claims to be introducing, pursuing, or defending them. In short, democracy promises much, but faced with its exacting standards and open-ended imperatives, it cannot deliver what it promises. This is one reason democracy seems to specialize in resentment, perhaps the most common good among citizens. Democracy is linked, rightly so, to limitations, to violence, to death – especially its own.

Tragically, democracy starts killing itself at birth, and the killing continues throughout its lifetime. These deaths, large and small, often go unrecognized – but not unfelt. Promises broken, possibilities obstructed, and injustices inflicted generate disaffection, anger, perhaps violence, each directed at democracy itself. In a sense, people must perpetually hope for and mourn the democracy (always being) taken from them. Political loss, in other words, necessarily shapes the democratic experience: power taken; sovereignty denied; values profaned; faith undermined.