Democracy is a political system for people who are not sure that they are right

From Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government by E.E. Schattschneider

Democracy has no place for the kind of justice implied in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Democracy is a system for the resolution of conflict, not for vengeance. Simple black-white notions of right and wrong do not fit into democratic politics. Political controversies result from the fact that the issues are complex, and men may properly have differences of opinion about them. The most terrible of all over-simplifications is the notion that politics is a contest between good people and bad people. Democracy is based on a profound insight into human nature, the realization that all men are sinful, all are imperfect, all are prejudiced, and none knows the whole truth. That is why we need liberty and why we have an obligation to hear all men. Liberty gives us a chance to learn from other people, to become aware of our own limitations, and to correct our bias. Even when we disagree with other people we like to think that they speak from good motives, and while we realize that all men are limited, we do not let ourselves imagine that any man is bad. Democracy is a political system for people who are not sure that they are right.

Right vs. wrong, truth vs. falsehood, beauty vs. ugliness, intelligence vs. stupidity. All totalitarian systems rest on the conviction that there is a knowable right, truth, beauty, intelligence which can deterministically be known by the right people and which can be coercively imposed by the enlightened.

The children of freedom know that there are a few dichotomies but more consequentially that we are surrounded by complexity. Exogenous complexity and indigenous complexity. And it is not static complexity, it is dynamic, always evolving and shape-shifting. The self (and its goals and priorities) which we think we know at one moment is subject to change by circumstance and changed awareness and knowledge. That is the tragedy, our convictions are soft clay resting on quicksand.

Democracy, to work well, needs citizens motivated by conviction but constrained by humility in the awareness of their own profound ignorance and fallibility.