Redeeming Failure: Du Bois and King on Democratic Impatience's Potential

• In Event: Du Bois and Democratic Theory: Race, Capitalism, and the State

Abstract

Democratic theorists consider patience a democratic virtue. They do so not simply due to its putative benefits, but also because they associate impatience with failure. Impatience is supposedly self-defeating.

Is democratic impatience bound to fail, as democratic theorists have argued? Respectively, should democratic impatience be abandoned if it fails to achieve its goals? My response to both questions is No. First, democratic impatience can be effective, as I show by considering Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sense that democratic impatience works in his _Why We Can’t Wait_. Second, I argue that any failures of democratic impatience may tell us more about the weight of the problem being confronted than about the merits of democratic impatience itself. To put it bluntly, not the democratically impatient have failed but those who refuse to support democratic transformation. I develop this second argument mostly with the help of Du Bois’s _Souls of Black Folk_, especially the chapter “Of the Coming of John.” Finally, drawing on King’s _Where Do We Go From Here_ I consider the possibility that democratic impatience’s effects may be more ambivalent: democratic impatience may seem effective initially but may turn out to be a failure in hindsight. However, King’s disillusionment with white supremacy’s persistence does not cause him to abandon democratic impatience. Instead, he doubles down on it, by extending it to challenging militarism and economic injustice, and by globalizing it. King and Du Bois, then, provide a critical corrective to democratic theory: the potential of failure does not by itself discredit democratic impatience; any failures on the part of democratic impatience may in fact reinforce the need for this contingent, democratic virtue.

Author

• Mario Feit, Georgia State University