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life converted to the acceptance of injury and injustice, democratic humility provides a
political orientation towards pervious actions and judgments that will make it more
possible to effectively contest the cultural complacency and political dogmatisms that
often short circuit claims for justice and inclusion.
Of course, a cultivated ethos of democratic humility cannot deny or obviate the
importance of making difficult political judgments under conditions of uncertainty. Nor
can it deny or change the fact that coercive political power will at times be necessary to
implement the authoritative decisions of a regime. But a cultivated and practiced
disposition of democratic humility may improve the overall quality, wisdom, and justice
of policy and law in the following ways. First, democratic humility may improve the
quality and wisdom of political judgments by encouraging citizens and leaders to attend,
with as much openness, care, and foresight as possible, to the lived experiences and ways
of knowing and seeing that characterize all those who might be affected by a particular
public policy or judgment. Democratic humility is needed in public policy making today
because there are simply too many examples where an initial failure of understanding,
combined with a rigid and one-dimensional ideological perspective, spawns a series of
unintended policy outcomes that soon generate their own independent political alliances
and thereby solidify much of our politics in a recriminating cycle of resentment, self-
interest, and bad faith. I don’t want to suggest that democratic humility is something that
stands prior to or above basic concerns of justice, but rather that the justness of justice is
more readily discernible to all where political judgments are marked by this kind of
humility. While the proper space or condition of democratic humility is bounded only by
the political sphere itself, under contemporary real-life conditions of political and
Convention