After reading and thinking lot on democracy, esp. via its nemeses totalitarianism and authoritarianism, I feel like its procedures and structures are like externalities which cannot on their own safeguard but presuppose a certain attitude of people for it to work. And so I reach back (and thus forward) for Susan Griffin, "Wrestling with the Angels of Democracy: On Being an American Citizen" (2008). Here I find a paragraph that sounds right on time:

«It is not a history I write, not even an exposition of democracy, I am aiming at neither a definition nor a catalogue of qualities. It is the inner states that generate and are generated by democracy that interest me, and the purpose lies in the journey itself too.» (p. 6)

The decline of democracy and the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes feels like one phenomenon, the ubiquitous counter-movement of #peakfascism with the continuous rebuttal of authoritarianism at the ballot boxes like another. Or rather: Both display to me a search of what connects people with their fellow men, and that this search, confusedly but deliberately placed on externalities of the political body, is a search not only for mutual communal alignment but for a sense of how to be a reciprocal and mutual individual.

Politcal constellations, and societies moved thereby, not only presuppose certain "mental" states of those who live under them; not only impact or change them as well; they are ways for people to individualize, to gain sense of their being, and to enact the communal aspect of their psychê.

Put differently: People not only reach an understanding of themselves by grasping how they differ from others but likewise by grasping what they have in common. That psychê (in contrast to the "I") is a communal thing, a flock of birds of other voices past, present and future, is one aspect of this. That psychê entails morals, agency, and responsibility, and thus often the deliberate disregard for one's individual goals and gains, is another.

Democracy not just requires but fosters mutual alignment but what may loosely be called one's grace. Not just the graceful disregard of one's personal egoism but the grace that is bestowed when one acts or refrains accordingly. To me, the current political struggles of demcracy are also a search for and regain of this peculiar grace.