Yes, Virgina, there is a democratic United States of America.
“Virginia, your friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see.”
Democracy cannot be seen. It is an idea. You cannot see it, but what you can do is learn all about it. You can know it, believe in it, and hold it in your heart. You can hold it in your mind and allow its principles to guide you. That makes it real to you and me and millions of others. The strength of an idea is in the number who believe in it.
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to our life its highest beauty and joy.”
In fact, Virginia, those are the very things upon which democracy is based. Yes, democracy was a way to govern great masses of people dreamt up by well-meaning people. They wanted to govern based on caring, love, generosity, and equity. It replaced many ways of governing based on muscle, greed, and lack of caring; based on suppression of the many for the benefit of the few.
“Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus!”
Without democracy, a shining light on the hill would be extinguished. The anguished worldwide would have nowhere to run if they were abused in their own homeland. It would be a sadder world—drearier, and more hopeless. Don’t believe in democracy? You might as well not believe in Santa Claus! How much sadder and grayer the world would be without either. Would you like proof that there are enough people now, and will always be, who believe in sharing, who believe in their fellow men and women, to enable them to believe in democracy? To enable the ideal of democracy to always be more than an idea to be a reality? Want proof? Maybe you cannot see an idea, but you can see an idea in action.
Watch now—see the people line up for hours to express their choice at the polls. Watch and see the people who understand that there are enemies of democracy risk safety and treasure to defend the idea. Watch as they take a cut in pay and risk misunderstandings to make the levers of government turn. Watch the people laugh and chatter as they walk the streets believing they are safe among fellow countrymen. Now, I admit, Virginia, you cannot see the idea that informs the behavior, but you see the behavior democracy permits, allows, and encourages. Nobody sees an idea, but they can tell you about all the fine things they are doing and plan to do because of that idea.
“Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.”
Some things you intuit. Some things you believe in no matter what.
“Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else as real and abiding.”
There is nothing more real than men and women coming together, planning a way of living together, with good will and a commitment to do well.
“No Santa Claus?” Or a world where people lost faith in democracy? In that world, what could make “glad the hearts of children?”
If now or ever your friends ask you to lose faith in democracy, look around, and trust yourself. It is “faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance” that bridges the gap between the ideal and the material world that “makes glad the hearts of children.”
If it disconcerts, confuses, makes you mad or sad, walk away. If it makes you happy, open, proud, motivated, welcome, pilgrim, to a good idea.
Written by Francis Pharcellus Church, published in “Is There a Santa Clause?” in The Sun, September 21, 1897 (in quotation marks throughout), and Carole Owens, The Berkshire Edge, November 7, 2023.
