On Democratic Faith

1.

Much has changed in the year since the first printing of this book in June of 2024. But its basic questions—which concern the struggle between despair and hope in the confrontation between radical democratic politics and the terrifying and, at times, seemingly immovable realities of tyrannical political power—remain, sadly, very much still open and alive. Indeed, sitting here in America in 2025, beneath these ever lengthening shadows of authoritarian power, these questions seem to me even more urgently alive than before. 

At its most concrete, the questions explored in this book concern a chain of events that pertain mostly to the democratic movement in China from the 1980s up to the present day. These questions are, I believe, important and interesting in and of themselves. However, they were, for me, never merely ends-in-themselves. They were always also a way to explore certain other questions of a more general, abstract, and, say, philosophical nature—questions concerning the strategy and, as I am inclined to think of them now, the ethos of radical democratic politics as a whole. 

By “ethos,” I mean something like the culture and character which informs radical democratic politics, or the form or shape of its spirit. This gloss is pretty abstract. So let me try to be concrete. A unifying theme in the pages to follow concerns the legitimacy, possibility, and proper form of democratic faith. Without democratic faith, I believe, there can be no democratic politics at all. If a truly democratic form of life is ever to be actualized, it will be because in spite of all darkness and doubt, we will have held onto our faith and staked it deep into the firmaments of the Earth as a cornerstone on which our new culture will be built. And here as elsewhere, what is true of the city is true also of the soul: the character of all those who seek to the realization of the democratic projects cannot but be sustained and informed by faith. For without it, we ourselves will inevitably come undone. This is the sense in which faith is essential to the form of our spirit. And this is why this question of the legitimacy and possibility of democratic faith is, in effect, a question of the very possibility of the project of radical democratic politics as a whole. 

2.

The phrase “democratic faith” is John Dewey’s, and it may be found threaded throughout his corpus as what is perhaps its deepest animating pulse. The substance of this faith is an abiding belief in a universal but as-yet-fully-realized human capacity for creative, intelligent, empathetic conversation and judgment—a belief which in turn grounds our prospects for a flourishing, creative, rationally self-determining and self-corrective form of life that will not just be free of violence, oppression, and coercion, but that will constitute the fullest and finest expression of individual and collective freedom in the history of humankind. As Dewey put it in a short speech he gave in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War entitled “Creative Democracy”:

"The democratic faith in human equality is the belief that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he has. The democratic belief in the principle of leadership is a generous one. It is universal. It is belief in the capacity of every person to lead his own life free from coercion and imposition by others provided the right conditions are supplied. Democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished." (1939/1988)

The democrat’s claim is that true human flourishing can only be realized in a truly democratic world. Dewey casts this claim as a “faith” because it is, as he says elsewhere in his speech, “without basis” in the real world. Here, however, it is crucial to be clear about what Dewey means. For Dewey, the democratic claim is a faith, not because its confirmation is impossible, but because it remains for us a hypothesis and an experiment that stands in wait for the confirmation of experience. This faith is, in this sense, not so much unjustified or unjustifiable as it is as yet neither justified nor unjustified. For “the right conditions” under which proof for the democrat’s claim can be obtained have yet to be achieved. This is the sense in which the democratic faith hovers at present in ambiguity, as Dewey put it in Freedom and Culture, between a “dream” and a “penetrating vision.” (1939) We still do not know whether this shimmering ideal can become real. 

But there are, of course, in science as in everyday life, good hypotheses as well as bad hypotheses. So what reason do we have to believe that the democrat’s hypothesis is any good—a reasonable gambit, probable enough to be worth our effort and our time? Here’s Dewey’s answer to this question from the same 1939 speech:

"I have been accused more than once and from opposed quarters of an undue, a utopian, faith in the possibilities of intelligence and in education as a correlate of intelligence. At all events, I did not invent this faith. I acquired it from my surroundings as far as those surroundings were animated by the democratic spirit. For what is the faith of democracy in the role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, information of public opinion, which in the long run is self-corrective, except faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly and free communication." (1939/1988)

Dewey is here reminding us that while the vision of a wholly and truly democratic world remains a vision in the ideal, democratic life is importantly also already real in our existing world. Here and there, in a great variety of places and practices, we can already see the principles of democratic life being put fruitfully to work. Modern science is Dewey’s favorite example of an existing, self-correcting cultural enterprise that has made magnificent strides of historical progress in virtue of its foundational commitments to free inquiry and undistorted communication. But the lived experiences of “the democratic spirit” of which Dewey speaks in this passage reach far beyond science. Concealed behind Dewey’s unassuming words is a lifetime’s worth of experience practicing democracy in the pursuit of its realization. 

Among philosophers, hypocrisy is an ailment more common than the flu. But the briefest survey of Dewey’s life will reveal a man for whom his word was truly his bond. “Democracy,” says Dewey the philosopher, “is a personal way of individual life.” (1939) And so it was for Dewey the man. During his early years in Chicago, in the late 1890s and early 1900s, after witnessing the struggles of working-class immigrants and the poor, Dewey became an ardent supporter of striking union workers, and an important ally to Eugene Debs. Around the same time, he began to work out his vision and theory of democratic education in practice by founding and directing the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. There, he pioneered experimental pedagogical methods grounded in co-operative, experiential learning that were designed to cultivate the citizenry of the coming democratic world. Later, in the 1920s, Dewey became one of the founding members of the NAACP, and during the same period, he dedicated significant efforts in support of the newly founded ACLU. Throughout his (otherwise mind bogglingly prolific and successful philosophical) career, Dewey remained relentlessly engaged in American public life: in 1927, he publicly protested the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti; in 1936, he spearheaded the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky; and in 1940, he came to the defense of academic freedom, after his colleague Bertrand Russell’s appointment to the City University of New York was jeopardized following the lobbying efforts of Christian reactionaries. 

Must I say more? Perhaps not, but I will—because how could I fail to mention the foundationally important and criminally underappreciated role Dewey played in the history of our very own democracy movement back home? In 1919, following a brief lecture circuit through Japan, Dewey arrived in China on the invitation of his students (which most notably included Hu Shi) just as the May Fourth Movement was taking this ancient civilization by storm. Deeply moved and inspired by the spirited democratic tides that were rising in this faraway land, he and his wife ended up staying in the country for two whole years. During this period, Dewey picked up a visiting professorship at Beijing University, travelled to thirteen of the twenty-eight provincial regions of the time, and delivered over two hundred lectures in which he propounded his philosophical ideas and advocated for educational reform, democratization, and scientific enlightenment—moving the culture so profoundly that the CCP iconized him immediately following the founding of PRC as its foreign public intellectual enemy number one.

A fanboy digresses—the point is: these are the grounds on which Dewey is staking his claim that he did not “invent” but had “acquired” his democratic faith from his “surroundings as far as those surroundings were animated by the democratic spirit.” Ultimately, Dewey’s belief in democracy is one which has enough strength to take the form of faith because it is firmly grounded in a lifetime’s worth of experience embodying the democratic spirit in himself while cultivating it in the world. For Dewey, the idea that democracy promises to beget the good life can be one about which he has no doubt, because it is one which he himself time and again experienced and realized in fact. 

What remains prospective, however—what remains, for Dewey, for us, an unrealized vision in the ideal and, therefore, a task—is a truly and fully democratic form of life. And for Dewey, the conditions on which the realization of this vision remains contingent can be distilled down to two things: (1) the ethical, aesthetic, and scientific education of its citizenry, and (2) the cultivation of a vibrant, free, and undistorted discursive culture. As Dewey recognized, unless these two conditions are met, democracy simply will not work—and as he also recognized, the barriers confronting the democrat on the path towards actualizing these conditions are, realistically, immense. From Dewey’s point of view in America in 1939, these barriers most notably included the nest and brood of race-, gender-, and class-based prejudice and inequality on the one hand, and the then newly emergent forms of technologically supercharged misinformation and propaganda on the other—in his words: “intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, [...] race, color, wealth or degree of culture,” (1939/1988) and “those technologies produced by modern science which have multiplied the means to modify the dispositions of the mass of the population; and which in conjunction with economic centralization, have enabled mass opinion to become like physical goods, a matter of mass production.” (1939) As Dewey recognized long ago, unless these pathologies are exorcized from the body politic, the dream of a freely self-determining and self-correcting form of life lived in freedom and the fullness of communication will remain forever just that—a dream.

3.

For me, it is hard to read Dewey’s speech in 2025 without feeling some grief, some disappointment for what we have become. It is not just the paltry progress which this century’s worth of time and work have secured. For the attuned reader, Dewey’s words are rife with painful reminders of the present state of American regression and decline. Time and again in his speech, Dewey cautions that “merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred” and undermined by radical inequalities of wealth, and a media culture which has been thoroughly corrupted by these compounding pathologies. (1939/1988) 

But today, under the current American regime, we are no longer secure even in our possession of our “merely legal guarantees of civil liberties.” For Dewey, these basic conditions of democracy had seemed so obviously necessary that the task he set himself was instead the emphasis of their insufficiency. Reading these words written in the pre-Civil Rights era, during a different surge of global fascism, and on the eve of war, I wonder whether Dewey was entitled to feel as assured as he did about the solidity of these guarantees—and indeed, given the fact that Dewey was fully aware of what historical moment he was in, whether these words are meant to be taken so much as expressions of assuredness as of assurance. But I am distracting myself: the task of fighting for these merest of civil liberties to free speech and assembly has, for us, returned. As we speak, our fellow students, academics, journalists, activists, and artists—our friends without whose spirit, power, and genius the dream of democracy shall never be real—sit in prisons and deportation centers, betrayed and abandoned by the institutions whose self-proclaimed duty was to protect them, but whose true interests had always been aligned with the powers that be. Beginning with the defense of these merest civil liberties, the task before us is to muster every ounce of intelligence and courage we have to hold our democratic horizons open and alive. 

4.

There are words from this text, written just a year ago, which I cannot help but read with some embarrassment today. In the third essay of this text, written on June 3rd 2024, I had this: 

 It seems clear to me that presently, given the sheer power of the Chinese state, no such movement could possibly grow within the borders of the People’s Republic of China. There can be no movement, no sustained campaign of claim making, so long as we can be observed and threatened in our every move. In this respect, I cling onto more hope for Gaza, than for China—as hopeless as Gaza is. For as hostile as American soil is to the Palestinian liberation movement, the basic insurance of liberties in America and elsewhere in the liberal West, however incomplete and imperfect, still holds out the possibility of effective social movements. Crush as they may the campus protests—the movement can still find space to reclaim its momentum, online, and elsewhere in the streets.  

These words were written in the midst of the waves of violent police crackdowns that swept across university campuses in Europe and the United States following the cowardly and repugnant example of the Columbia University administration. At the time, I felt the need to urge that hope was not lost, in spite of the terrible setbacks which were befalling liberation movements around the globe. I felt the need to say that we must resist the temptation to interpret these protests as failures, since that is just the conclusion those who ordered the crackdowns wanted us to draw. Insofar as the strategic intent of their violence is precisely the construction of despair, reminding ourselves of every reason we have for hope becomes an act of resistance in and of itself. Against state terrorism, our duty is to recall ourselves to the spaces for political freedom we still possess, and can still create; it is to hold in shining memory and draw inspiration from the spectacular strength, solidarity, and spontaneity of the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests as a whole, in order to carry on its work. For so long as the movement continues to surge forth with life, the historical significance of those protests remains ours to contest.  

But the grounds on which I had then staked my claim for hope proved to be far more fragile than I supposed. In what turned out to be no time at all, it became clear that I took for granted as politically given in America what was in, in reality, contingently achieved and maintained, and that I had failed to appreciate the real and permanent threat of regression which has since been realized as fact. My hope for Gaza, along with my confidence in America and the rest of the liberal West, proved to this extent to be ridiculously naive. 

As I write this the basic civil liberties to free speech and assembly in America have not yet been completely annulled. The walls of authoritarian power are closing in on us daily, but to the extent that our horizons remain open, we must believe that they are open enough. The situation in America remains, for one, incomparable with that of China. As we speak, protest, resistance, and dissent roar on across the country on campuses, online, in courthouses, and in the streets. However, this time, we — i.e. I — must not take their existence so much for granted. We must not forget that it is on account of ongoing struggle alone that our horizons have not yet been shuttered closed, and we must not tire to remind ourselves that the possibility of resistance rests as much on the activity of resistance as the other way around. Insofar as we still retain reason for hope, and elbow room to speak and to act, we must, therefore, act and speak with hope and urgency in pursuit of ever more space for speech and action and hope.

Let this be a lesson—if just to me alone—to never again take for granted whatever little freedom we have. The narrow bands of institutionalized space for resistance which we possess today have never been gifts granted to us on the generosity of the powers that be. In every single case, they had to be wrested from their claws through struggle, with the blood, sweat, and tears of our comrades and ancestors whose legacies and dreams we inherit, and whose work we must carry on with a sense of gratitude and sacred duty today. “Democracy,” Dewey says, “is a moral ideal and so far as it becomes a fact is a moral fact.” (1939/1988) What is ideal can become real and has, indeed, on occasion become real—but by the same token, what is real can always regress into the merely ideal. Insofar as democracy is already a fact, then, our task is to defend its facticity, and insofar as democracy remains a moral ideal, our task remains to realize it as fact.    

5.

Disavowals of knowledge and certainty with respect to the future of democratic politics—the refrain “I don’t know, I don’t know”—recur time and again across the pages to follow. These pages are very much, very often marred with the mood of despair. Regretfully, I confess that these words and these moods continue to resound in my heart. Indeed, this is precisely why I feel the need to recite and recite my mantras of hope. Often I feel I still do not know—whether it makes sense in these times of terrible darkness to hope for freedom, to hold faith in democracy, whether these beautiful dreams are delusions, and whether perhaps we really ought to resign ourselves to despair, or if not despair, then at least to what my father, in the wake of his disillusionment, described as “一个普通人的尊严和快乐” or the dignity and happiness of an ordinary man. (The issue with this last option, of course, is that it is not at all obvious whether dignity and happiness of this “ordinary” sort are possible—or at least truthfully possible—the question being whether they can ever be anything but twisted articles of willful ignorance and bad faith, so long as we live as we live now, in a world blooded by injustice.)  

While I have not since ceased to vacillate between these incommensurable moods, the publication of this book—call it a lived experience of democratic practice—has given me one more reason, at least, to go on vacillating and not be lost to despair. I did not imagine that this text would require a second printing so soon, and I cannot begin to express my gratitude for having found, through it, so many friends with whom to interrogate these questions, and share the burden of these dreams and these doubts. These experiences of friendship and community have on many occasions helped lift me beyond my depressive, neurotic doubts concerning hope’s justification and ground. The work I have been able to do with Everything Matters Press—my newfound involvement in the zine and small press publishing worlds—have in so many ways been lifelines for me during these otherwise dark days. On the strength of these experiences, and your friendship through readership, I am grateful to have been able to find and found a deeper, richer, more stable democratic faith. 

Allow me then to extend these freshly printed pages to you, dear reader, as an invitation of sorts. Think of it as an invitation to share attention and dwell together, if only among words, within an experience of democracy, in memory as well as in act, so as to perhaps replenish and deepen our faith. To quote Dewey one last time: “The task of democracy is forever that of the creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute.” (1939) It is just a moment of such an experience that I hope to share with you here.