The fragility of democracy

Modern Age, Spring, 2006 by Jude P. Dougherty

Some would delve further into history to find the source of Hooker's doctrines in what Brian Tierney calls the "theological jurists," who by his account were the first to formulate a theory of natural rights. No one would look to Suarez, Bellarmine, Vitoria, and Las Cassas as the immediate source of the principles assumed in these founding documents, yet their discussions of "natural rights" and "equality" laid the foundation for what was to come. These ideas played an important role in the American and the French "revolutions." A full accounting, no doubt, would acknowledge a distinctive Western intellectual tradition, extending from Aristotle and the Stoics through the medieval canonists to their impact on English common law. (7) Harry Jaffa, in a book on the American founding, sees the Declaration of Independence as interpreted by Lincoln to be based on a kind of Aristotelian Christianity. (8)

John Stuart Mill, like Hooker but writing from an entirely different perspective, acknowledged the people as the source of all civic authority, yet he feared what he called "social tyranny." The will of the people, he warned, is not alone an adequate safeguard of liberty. "Self-government" and "the power of the people to rule themselves" do not express the complete picture. The will of the people practically means the will of the most numerous or the will of the most active part of the people. Mill consequently advocated measures to thwart the tyranny of the majority. Mill also addressed the possibility of a small group of like-minded people seizing the levers of power to achieve their own ends quite apart from the disposition of the people and even the elected government. (9)

Jacques Maritain, in a short work entitled Christianity and Democracy (10) reflecting on the relationship between the two suggests, "The democratic impulse has arisen in human history as a temporal manifestation of the Gospel." He speaks of Christianity as "a leaven in the social and political life of a nation." Yet Maritain recognized that Christianity is not linked to democracy. To be a Christian, he held, does not compel one to support a democratic form of government. He reminds us that it was only after the Second World War that the Vatican declared in favor of parliamentary democracy. Looking to the recent history of the Continent, no one can deny that Christianity played a central role in the formation of the new European democracies in the post-war period, in the drafting of their basic law, and in the drafting of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights.

Maria Mitchell, in her essay, "Antimaterialism in Early German Democracy," tells us that at its formation there was no agreement in the CDU as to the meaning of "Christian Democracy." (11) Sufficient for the time was the unity of Catholics and Lutherans in their endorsement of a democratic form of government and in their opposition to materialism and secularism. Conservative Protestants as well as Catholics recognized the link between materialism and national socialism, and in the post-war years Protestants joined Catholics in portraying the task of politics as the transformation of secular society. "Inherent in political activity," explained Paul Bausch, a former member of the Christian Social People's Service (CSVD), "is the responsibility to subordinate every aspect of political life to the demands of Christian laws.... 'The Ten Commandments of God' delineate the iron foundation for state life.... The task for us today is to replace a Godless government with a government that respects God's commandments and makes them principles of life for the Volk and of the state." (12) Bausch implied that if we are not ready to organize in the light of Christian principles, the opposition would organize society for us on utilitarian principles. Mitchell concurs: