Todd Nelson identified Walt Whitman’s great Reconstruction-era essay “Democratic Vistas” as a way to understand our perilous time (“Revisit the cautionary words of Walt Whitman,” Nov. 11).

Whitman was a great soul who witnessed many of the transformative events during the still-controversial period after the Civil War. Although one commentator described Whitman’s prose style here as “diffuse, tortured and murky,” reading (or rereading) “Democratic Vistas” still offers profound insights and might inform our experience.

But Whitman was too exuberant about democracy’s potential and insufficiently aware of its limits. In one passage, Whitman claimed: “The movements of the late Secession war, and their results, to any sense that studies well and comprehends them, show that Popular Democracy, whatever its faults and dangers, practically justifies itself beyond the proudest claims and wildest hopes of its enthusiasts.”

That might have been Whitman’s sincere assessment when his essay was published 1871, but it goes too far to my eye if applied by analogy to the recent presidential election, which exposed the faults and dangers of popular democracy without vindicating them. Whitman apparently considered democracy to be the end. However, the public good actually is always the objective of government, and our representative democracy is believed to be the best way to achieve it. Did it succeed in this election? I have serious doubts.

I taught freshman-level history and political science for over 20 years and often assigned my students to read Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas.’ But the purpose of that exercise was to stimulate thought, not to provide ultimate answers, especially for the present.

Steven S. Berizzi
Norwalk, Conn.