“…the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity’s imperfection, he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the object of a conscious choice. Finally, he subscribes to the pessimism that sees in politics the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men will contribute to the good of the state.”
Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, quoted by Clive James. This is a remarkable distillation of what beliefs democratic government reflects. By ‘liberal,’ of course, Aron means the liberal humanist of the Western tradition, not specifically a leftist.
