The day before the presidential inauguration (cause for genuine if cautiously optimistic jubilation), Miltonista finds himself thinking somewhat dark thoughts. It's not just the tanking economy (if you haven't done so already, double check your credit card APRs! Miltonist was shocked the other day to find that his had skyrocketed to usurious levels!) and all the other woes at home and abroad. What also weighs heavily on my mind is the question of how ecumenical this spirit of excitement about our new president really is. Or, to put it more simply, what about those 58 million people who voted for the other guy and his stupid running mate? Even more troubling is the twenty-five or thirty percent of the populace who still approve of the current president. Sure, I suppose that's a low enough number to merit some righteous we-told-you-so indignation. But that still represents tens of millions of people who are deluded or willful or bitter enough to think Bush has been doing a good job.

The central crisis in Milton's political thought is still our own: a commitment to liberty and representative government can easily clash with deep-seated, carefully formed convictions when the citizenry doesn't seem to abide by them. This might initially seem like a banal by-product rather than a true crisis: we all have different convictions and democracy will inevitably frustrate all of us at some point. Those on the Left, the Right, in between, and beyond can all share the lived experience of absolutely knowing your own convictions to be the right ones, of knowing that the other side is wrong, and of watching as your own side loses (or wins by 53%).

But part of the deeper crisis of democracy is a rift between political action and knowledge. Adherence to democracy seems to demand at least some level of relativism: yes, I am given the right to cling to my own convictions passionately, but I recognize that you, too, believe in your convictions, and I must respect your right to uphold them. And if 53% of the populace votes against my convictions, I will not go out and try to kill 3.5% of the populace that disagrees with me. (I realize that here, I'm probably straying away from Milton and toward Zizek). But what room does that leave not only for maintaining but also acting upon non-negotiable convictions?

For academically minded left-leaners (or, for that matter, for Milton himself) one option is, for lack of a better word, elitism. In The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, a text that reacts to the English hurtling back toward monarchy, Milton suggests that one of those ways might be "to well qualify and refine elections: not committing all to the noise and shouting of a rude multitude, but permitting only those of them who are rightly qualified to nominate as many as they will." The reference to the "rude multitude" will strike us as jarring, crabbed, outdated. Elitism should not be the right answer. But doesn't this response actually only serve as evidence of the crisis described above? Yes, the rhetoric of the rude multitude isn't very nice, but what does it mean to live in a society in which being qualified intellectually or desiring intellectual qualification in our leaders almost automatically carries the stigma of being an elitist? Let's be frank: is there a way to diagnose the fact that those who still approve of Bush are deluded or wrong without lapsing into that position of knowledge that we often label elitism?

For me, one of the most vein-popping moments of the presidential debates was when McCain tried to poke fun at Obama for being eloquent. The audacity of any American who aims for eloquence! (All of this points to the other deep crisis in any representative government: what happens when voters can't seem to choose candidates based on merit, or when charisma and/or single hot-button issues overshadow merit? Thank god we have a president-elect who combines charisma with knowledge and skill, but for every Obama there's a Reagan or a Ventura or a Schwarznegger.)

Of course, Milton wasn't just some simple, pig-headed dogmatist. For all of his polemical feistiness, Milton clearly realized that political action requires finesse and provisional alliances. But what we'll witness tomorrow when Rick Warren delivers the opening prayer--what we've already witnessed in the angry writings about his presence at the inauguration--is the obnoxiousness of maintaining those alliances, of pandering to people who we believe to be wrongheaded. But democracy demands just this.