#96, “Democracy,” Leonard Cohen (1992)

150 Favorite Songs: #96, “Democracy,” Leonard Cohen (1992)

Here’s what is probably my corniest personal habit: Every election day, to ease my overwhelming anxiety around the state of the world, I listen to “Democracy” by Leonard Cohen over and over again, pretty much the whole day. I just find it comforting, even though the song itself isn’t particularly reassuring (it’s more arch than it is uplifting). Maybe it’s just the ritual that I find reassuring, plus maybe the fact that seven minute chunks of what is always a very long day get eaten up by middle-late period Leonard Cohen’s soothing baritone. Who knows! But this is my confession. I am cringe.

“Democracy” is a little hokey as a song anyway. I mean that as a compliment—I like corniness, in music and elsewhere—but it opens with those martial drums that you have to sort of roll your eyes at and say, “oh, I get it, we’re doing a thing here.” The bass is this dated synth line, and it gets matched with this weird electronic fife or something. Leonard Cohen, who is one of the truly transcendent writers in the history of rock and roll, drops the facade and delivers lines like “oh baby, we’ll be making love again” as an aside. There’s a bridge that recurs that is built around a boat metaphor (“the reefs of greed” and “the squalls of hate” both make appearances.) But the medium is the message, as they say, and for a song meant as a wry (but ultimately still somehow hopeful?) commentary on political structures, corniness really fits.

But then he’ll also hit a verse that starts with “it’s coming to America first / the cradle of the best and of the worst” and I’ll find myself getting chills nonetheless, because Cohen—a Canadian who lived mostly in the U.S. in his later life—sees things very clearly. You can neither fully celebrate nor fully disregard this country he’s singing about, and every time you try to do either, there’s a ready counterpoint. This is the point of “Democracy,” the theme he explores throughout the course of the song, even if he doesn’t bother to just state it outright until the fourth verse. You can’t really understand America, because it’s a place full of contradictions, built on those contradictions, created with hopeful ideals of equality by men who owned slaves and didn’t allow women to vote. The conceit of the song, that “democracy is coming to the U.S.A,,” is an acknowledgment of tension—that living up to that vision must still be in the future, because it’s not here yet.

Except that’s genuinely hopeful, so there’s another interpretation, too, that I think Leonard Cohen very much had in mind when he wrote the song: America, famously, spent the four or five decades before he wrote this song bringing “democracy” around the world, which was often a code for U.S.-backed military coups that removed elected leaders whom the U.S. government didn’t want to see in power in favor of authoritarians it felt were sympathetic to its cold war aims. When “democracy” came to those places, it did so with violence, and against the will of the people. There’s an element to Cohen’s hopeful play on words that sounds like a threat—“Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.” isn’t something to look forward to, if it comes to this country the way it came to Chilé.

Cohen, I’m pretty confident, wanted the listener to have access to both interpretations. “It’s coming from the silence on the dock of the bay,” he sings in the second verse—a nod to Otis Redding, and by extension, to rock and roll, to the creative force of the twentieth century that made America irresistible to parts of the world whose leaders didn’t need to be deposed in order to be shaped by American ideals, itself a contradiction (art made by many of America’s most oppressed made the country incredibly attractive to people around the world!), but then he goes on, “from the brave, the bold, the battered heart of Chevrolet,” a sardonic invocation of a car commercial, a contrast that just absolutely refuses to let you feel good about the first part of the couplet.

The song concludes with a verse that, I think, is secretly one of Cohen’s finest. And I guess it’s also why I love the song, and why I find it comforting on days when my anxiety is through the roof. I meant it when I wrote that I don’t think the song is uplifting, but I think what I really mean is that I don’t think its message is bullshit. In the last verse, he’s dismissive of pretty much everything, but also allows himself to be moved: “I’m neither left or right, I’m just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless little screen,” he sings, and it doesn’t really matter if he’s speaking for himself as the narrator, or if he’s trying to identify as the prototypical American he imagines, because even if he’s singing about being apolitical, he lands it anyway, acknowledging that, despite all of that, “I’m stubborn as those garbage bags that time can not decay / i’m junk, but i’m still holding up this little wild bouquet,” he sings. “Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.” It’s neither a dream nor a threat, but something that ultimately is hopeful anyway, because I think it’s honest: It’s flawed, deeply flawed, maybe impossibly flawed, but it’s also the best you can do with what you’ve got. I like listening to “Democracy” on election days, I think, because it feels appropriate no matter if the candidates I’m hoping will win do so or if the ones I dread are successful. It validates either cynicism or hope by acknowledging that Americans have been justified in feeling either for a very long time, and that in either case, there’s more democracy coming, as either a threat or a promise, to the U.S.A.