The idea or ideal of a community presents, however, actual phases of associated life as they are freed from restrictive and disturbing elements, and are contemplated as having attained their limit of development.
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
gutenberg.org
Since things do not attain such fulfillment but are in actuality distracted and interfered with, democracy in this sense is not a fact and never will be.
It is an ideal in the only intelligible sense of an ideal: namely, the tendency and movement of some thing which exists carried to its final limit, viewed as completed, perfected.
Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life.
There is a free give-and-take: fullness of integrated personality is therefore possible of achievement, since the pulls and responses of different groups reënforce one another and their values accord.
But a good citizen finds his conduct as a member of a political group enriching and enriched by his participation in family life, industry, scientific and artistic associations.
The robber band cannot interact flexibly with other groups; it can act only through isolating itself.
But he does so only at the cost of repression of those of his potentialities which can be realized only through membership in other groups.
When these conditions are brought into being they will make their own forms.
The problem lies deeper; it is in the first instance an intellectual problem: the search for conditions under which the Great Society may become the Great Community.
The prime difficulty, as we have seen, is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests.
In this sense the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy.