Greg’s Reviews > The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution > Status Update

An administration that is impatient with democratic politics at home is not, on the face of it, the most likely promoter of democracy abroad…In response to the needs of the megastate, democracy is made safe for the world by being radically transformed at home.

Ever since World War I, when Woodrow Wilson justified America’s entrance into the war under the slogan of “making the world safe for democracy,” it has been commonplace for American presidents and political leaders to claim democracy both as an objective or end that justifies the use of state power and as a subject or agent whose will—because it is a democratic will—legitimates that end.

Marginal populations are not extraneous to state power but essential. This is because their status of pariah, as defined by the actions and rhetoric of public officials and politicians and disseminated by the media, represents the legitimation of an extension of state power. Marginality is the symbol of political helplessness...

By politicalness I mean our capacity for developing into beings who know and value what it means to participate in and be responsible for the care and improvement of our common and collective life. To be political is not identical with being a part of government or...a political party...they are opposed to the authentically political.

Think of how the theoretical object called ‘Shakespearian studies,’ how it has accumulated, and how much eighteenth- and nineteenth century scholarship is still read. Interpretative modes, we might say, are the guardians of plurality and difference, even sometimes to the point of preciosity. Their patron saint is Hegel. The idea is to keep things in the world, including memories of monstrous historical acts.

Memory, we might say, is the guardian of difference. The individual acquires and accumulates his or her different selves, and memory allows for re-collection. Difference within the self and between selves is not merely received; we may not choose our genders or our skin color, but we do choose in some measure how we are going to interpret the...differences we receive or acquire in the course of our lives.