“Inevitable” is for me a crucial word here. I take it to mean that the failures of democracy recur; they don’t come and go with one presidential election, one Supreme Court decision or appointment, one act of Congress. Excusing the failures of democracy, or disengaging from political participation as a result of them, gives up on democracy and lets disappointment harden into hopelessness. Cavell goes on to praise Ralph Waldo Emerson for seeing that the “training and character and friendship Emerson requires for democracy” are necessary “as preparation to withstand not its rigors but its failures”: necessary, in other words, to keeping “the democratic hope alive in the face of disappointment with it,” disappointment that keeps coming back. Emerson, Cavell adds, is “forever turning aside to say, especially to the young, not to despair of the world.”

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