Life & Wisdom Quote by Stuart Chase

A provocation disguised as a shrug: if democracy keeps disappointing you, Chase suggests, blame the counterfeits, not the ideal. The line borrows a familiar defense of Christianity - that its failures are the failures of followers, not doctrine - and repurposes it for politics. That borrowing matters. It smuggles democracy out of the grubby realm of institutions and into the cleaner realm of faith: something perpetually promised, endlessly deferred, protected from falsification.

Chase was writing as a 20th-century American public intellectual, watching the Great Depression expose how “democratic” societies could be economically oligarchic, and watching fascism and Stalinism sell themselves as efficient alternatives. In that context, the sentence works as both shield and spear. Shield: it insulates democracy from the charge that it’s inherently chaotic or impotent. Spear: it indicts the status quo as theater democracy - elections without real choice, rights without material security, citizenship without power.

The subtext is a dare to stop treating democracy as a weekend ritual and start treating it as a full-time distribution of agency. “Never really been tried” implies that what most countries call democracy is a partial implementation: formal votes paired with concentrated wealth, unequal access, managed media, and institutions designed to cool popular demand into procedural steam. Chase’s phrase also carries a sly warning: ideals that can’t be disproven can become excuses for inaction. If democracy is always “not yet,” reform can be endlessly postponed - or endlessly justified.