Political openings are precarious and require deliberate cultivation to survive

Evidence

These questions also challenge the Western liberal democratic conceit that humans have a natural and persistent desire for democracy. They presume instead that democratic self-rule must be consciously valued, cultured, and tended by a people seeking to practice it and that it must vigilantly resist myriad economic, social, and political forces threatening to deform or encroach upon it. They presume the need to educate the many for democracy, a task that grows as the powers and problems to be addressed increase in complexity. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 16 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

The political effi of these movements is, I would suggest, a function of the work they perform in the ethical realm-those strategies of cultivation through which embodied attachments to historically specifi forms of truth come to be forged. Their political project, therefore, can only be understood through an exploration of their ethical practices. This requires that we rethink not only our conventional understanding of what constitutes the political but also what is the substance of ethics. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 256 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Democracy must be deliberately cultivated rather than assumed natural. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 16; Movements’ political force depends on their ethical cultivation practices — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival…, 256

Broader Connections

• Democracy must be deliberately cultivated rather than assumed natural. #exemplifies (0.90) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 16
• Movements’ political force depends on their ethical cultivation practices #expands (0.85) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 256