Democracy is real because it encapsulates the space of failure.
The universal is incommensurable with the particular, but cannot, however exist without the latter. How is this relation possible? My answer is that this paradox cannot be solved, but that its non-solution is the very pre-condition to democracy. The solution of the paradox would imply that a particular body has been found, which would be the true body of the universal. But in that case, the universal would have found its necessary location, and democracy would be impossible. If democracy is possible, it is because the universal has no necessary body and no necessary content; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representation. Society generates a whole vocabulary of empty signifiers whose temporary signifieds are the result of a political competition. It is this final failure of society to constitute itself as society -- which is the same thing as the failure of constituting difference as difference -- which makes the distance between the universal and the particular unbridgeable, and, as a result, burdens concrete social agents with the impossible task of making democracy interaction achievable.
-Ernesto Laclau From Emancipation(s)