![]() ![]() Because he saw how thickly interleaved our individual dignities are, how interdependent our flourishing - saw that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” - he took it upon himself, a century and a half before his society did, to save democracy from politics, standing up for the rightful balance of dignity and power. Equality for him, be it of the genders or the races, was never a matter of politics - that plaything of the human animal - but a matter of naturalness. ![]() ![]() “I can conceive of no better service,” Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) wrote in contemplating the mightiest force of resistance in times far more troubled than ours, “than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.” To Whitman, who declared himself “the poet of the woman the same as the man,” the gravest weakness of democracy was the artificial, culturally manufactured inequality of the genders, which he recognized not only as a corruption of democracy but as a corruption of nature. ![]()
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