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RESIDENTS OF ESSEX know that the fried clam was invented in 1916 at Woodmans, a much-loved clam shack that hugs the Essex River in its last approach to the sea. But few remember that one of our most essential words emerged around the corner. Just down Route 133, a weather-beaten sign on the First Congregational Church recalls John Wise, the minister who helped serve this small seaside community when it was known as Chebacco. In a small book published 300 years ago, in 1717, Wise gave a new urgency to a term that had never been acceptable in polite society, and which still gives us trouble. Democracy the word is so basic to our lives that we barely pause to hear it.

The story of democracy resembles an immigrants tale, though we rarely think about it that way. Like many newcomers, the word was first received with hostility, and took decades to assimilate. But now, its so much a part of our heritage that we cant envision ourselves without it. And its as New England as those fried clams.

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From high school civics classes to presidential speeches, democracy is simply everywhere, part of a soundtrack that always plays faintly in the background. Even North Korea, the least democratic country on earth, calls itself The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. As Leonard Cohen wrote in his song Democracy, the term is so prevalent that its coming through a hole in the air. But a close study reveals that the word, like the thing itself, is more fragile than we might think. Or as Leonard Cohen would say, its real, but it aint exactly there.

That sounds right for 2017, when democracy is something of an endangered species. Abroad, it is not in vogue, as authoritarians crack down in Turkey, Egypt, and the Philippines, and Europe reels from one crisis to the next. At home, President Trump uses the catchphrases of democracy less often than his predecessors.

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To some extent, that represents the obvious Democrats tend to like democracy more than Republicans. In Andrew Jacksons day, the Democratic party called itself The Democracy; Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both gave frequent seminars about how a healthy democracy functions, including the value of opposition parties, the rule of law, a thriving free press. It is difficult to imagine President Trump going there.

A century after a hard-fought confirmation battle, the story of the first Jewish Supreme Court justice holds a lesson for Merrick Garland.

But some impressive Republicans have embraced democracy notably, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, who found democracy and freedom useful terms for what he was trying to build in Iraq. A new book by Condoleezza Rice, Bushs close adviser, manages to get both words into its title. Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom argues that the United States should not abandon the hard work of democracy abroad.

In fact, democracy has been contested for centuries, and New England furnished an early battleground. We love to quote John Winthrop in a way that makes him seem like a 20th century American; building a city upon a hill for all to see, a kind of theme park into which we can fit so much of what came later. But democracy was a term of reproach to the earliest Bostonians. John Cotton, spiritual leader to the first generation, wrote, Democracy, I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. Instead, responsible leaders were expected to emerge from a tightly-controlled network of ministers and magistrates, working in concert to suppress any unhealthy outbursts of popular feeling.

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But with time the old hierarchies gave way. In 1717, John Wise of Essex began to chip away at the authority of inherited ideas. Wise was not born into the Puritan elite the families, like the Mathers, that had dominated for decades. He was the son of an indentured servant who later became a butcher and a brewer Imbibe Wisely would have been a natural slogan for his product, if the Puritans had permitted advertising. When he went to Harvard, his father paid some of his tuition in malt.

But Wise did not feel especially inferior to the Mathers, or to anyone, and that helped him to argue in a new, more American language. He was a natural writer, with surprising wit for a Puritan. He was also commanding in person; of towering height, of great muscular power, stately and graceful in shape and movement; in his advancing years of an aspect most venerable. He grew up here, and when English officials began to impose new taxes and suppress dissent in the 1680s, he led a resistance. He was fined, jailed, and briefly stripped of his pulpit.

Such a figure was not likely to accept local intimidation either. In his rustic seat by the Essex River, he had grown steadily implacable, and when the Mathers tried a power grab, he was ready with a volley of verbal grapeshot. In 1717, he published A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches. On the surface, the book was about the way New England churches governed themselves, not electoral politics. But underneath, it was deeply political. Democracy is the theme of the book from start to finish; he uses the word often, like a cudgel, to club his opponents, and to argue that a church government that springs up from the people is better than one in which their betters make all the big decisions.

If Wises vocabulary was new; so was his reasoning, which drew not only from the Bible, but from the Light of Nature, and the Light of Reason phrases that were not so distant from the Enlightenment to come. To him, a human being was not quite as lost as the earliest Puritans had believed; but at the upper-end of Nature, a Creature of a very Noble Character, and therefore capable of self-government. In accents we would associate more with the end of the 18th century, he wrote, the end of all good government is to cultivate humanity, and promote the happiness of all, and the good of every man is all his Rights, his Life, Liberty, Estate, Honor, & without injury or abuse done to any. To this country parson, it was as plain as daylight that there was no Species of Government like a Democracy to attain this end.

Of course, 1717 was decades before independence, and Wise was not there yet. But when his book was republished in 1772, one of the subscribers was the future commander of the minutemen at Concord. It was republished again in 1860, at another moment when democracy seemed to be up for grabs. By that point, not many people remembered John Wise. But his distant voice, 300 years ago, helps explain one of the more remarkable transformations in our history the story of how Massachusetts steadily forged a new language of self-reliance. A single word, democracy, was the pivot.

Condoleezza Rice ends her book with a reflection on Winston Churchills witty line: democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. He made that remark in a parliamentary debate in 1947. In the same debate, Churchill cited Americas example, working out democracy over many generations, fine-tuning, self-correcting, oiling the works. Way back in our history, the son of an indentured servant spoke the word so loudly that it can still be heard, three centuries later, over the din of the diners ordering their fried clams.

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Democracy's immigrant story - The Boston Globe