If these are democratic times, then they are also violent times. Violence is not incidental or external to democracy, self-image notwithstanding, but fundamental to and constitutive of it. Formally democracy's relationship to violence alternates between regrettable, unavoidable, and unacceptable. In critical respects, however, violence is not only indispensable to democracy but also welcome in it – because it is exhilarating, empowering, and productive. Democracy, it might be said, thrives on violence and reaches a kind of pinnacle when it can be claimed, if only in retrospect, that violence exercised by that great figure, the people themselves, established, upheld, defended, or enhanced democratic principles and purposes. Democracy is thus an inherently risky, even deadly proposition, which is one reason why it requires a distinct public philosophy to articulate itself.

Pluralism, thanks to William E. Connolly, Isaiah Berlin, Chantal Mouffe, and others, has enjoyed a theoretical renaissance and might be considered the likely designee, especially given its compatibility, even implicit solidarity, with a tragic understanding of life and politics. At its best, a pluralist democracy provides a hospitable setting for the ineradicable presence of competition and conflict, manifested in mortal struggles over the identity and status of basic political values; hard, even impossible choices between equally worthwhile principles and goals; harms imposed and losses suffered in the pursuit of common ambitions and commitments; and ideals punctured at the peak of their success by virtue of that success.