How Do We Save Democracy?
“We must lean into the void.”
As we watch events unfold in Ukraine and our own civil society under siege at home, the question of whether democracy will survive is now ever present on our minds.
Recently at Trinity Spiritual Center in historic Southport, CT, French philosopher Raphael Liogier boldly asserted that democracy will flourish, if we lean into the original vision that our Founders shared for this nation. His full analysis of these times will not be published until next September as a 1000-page book entitled The Anguish of the Void. Until then, here is the essence of his thinking.
Liogier asserts that the solutions we seek have been with us for three hundred years, as they were deeply embedded in the Enlightenment movement, the intellectual and philosophical framework upon which this nation was founded. Unfortunately, we never fully embraced the vision upon which our Constitution was written.
As a result, a global culture of material determinism now threatens to destroy democracies around the world, and the U.S. is the epicenter of the battle over whether the principles of the Enlightenment and modernity will prevail. To preserve democracy, Liogier contends that we must now lean into the entire set of ideas that informed our Founders’ thinking and reject the distortion of their vision that we…
