The fragility of democracy

Modern Age, Spring, 2006 by Jude P. Dougherty

  Despite their agreement that only a Christian Germany could prevent
  the return of the evil of materialism, Catholics and Protestants
  grounded their critiques in two fundamentally different world
  views.... The dissimilarities, although conceptual and seemingly
  abstract, would nevertheless govern the dynamics of early Christian
  Democratic policy making. Even on such a fundamental level as the
  Protestant and Catholic understandings of the Christian individual,
  theologically based differences within the CDU shaped profoundly
  interconfessional cooperation. (13)

Drawing upon the work of Wilhelm Simpfendorfer and Otto Heinrich von Gablente, Mitchell locates the difference between Protestant and Catholic in the Reformation's emphasis on "the freedom of the individual," as contrasted with the Catholic emphasis on Gemeinschaft. Emphasis on the individual inevitably leads to a political liberalism at variance with the recognition of responsibility to a higher moral order. Catholic leaders in the CDU, she notes, only felt comfortable with the liberal position when it was willing to accommodate personal freedom to that higher moral responsibility.

The social and political influence of the Christian democratic parties remains, sometimes in ersatz form where the Christian roots are not openly acknowledged. The continued secularization of the masses obscures the pre-political values that gave rise to an inherited political order. It may be plausibly argued that to survive, European democracy must acknowledge its pre-political roots, roots that may be difficult to recover without reference to the Hellenic and Christian sources of Europe itself. Neither source can be understood apart from its common realistic--in the classical metaphysical sense--conception of human nature and human destiny, one that includes the transcendent as well as the material. Western liberalism and Marxism alike ignore the spiritual dimension of human striving. The fatuous optimism of the contemporary left, underestimating human passion and mistakenly believing that man's needs are limited and easily satisfied, can only lead to hopeless despair.

II

Having called attention to the pre-political conditions of democracy and the unity provided by a common faith or civic creed, it is necessary to acknowledge that democracy is vulnerable from a number of interior threats. The benefits of self-governance can be lost by the indiscriminate awarding of suffrage to illegal immigrants, by a politically biased media that limits access to vital information, by the excessive toleration of deviant behavior and the concomitant failure to punish, by the surrender of basic freedoms in the name of safety, and by the docile acceptance of a bureaucratic imperium and a politicized judiciary. Undoubtedly the list could go on.

In contemporary political discourse we hear much about the value of diversity, multiculturalism, and globalization. Yet diversity under the rule of law presupposes an accepted order of society. In the United States the nineteenth-century melting pot successfully blended elements of Christian Europe, but in the twentieth the melting pot has become a cauldron of unmeltable--not simply ethnics--but cultures. The contemporary Western liberal concept of democracy assumes uncritically that men are naturally and morally equal, an assumption that does not bear empirical scrutiny. Wide disparity as a result of parental upbringing and education leaves the populace polarized in a way that is more fundamental than disparity of income. That is only one among many divisive factors. In many American states the electorate is likely to contain undocumented aliens as well as lawful immigrants. Both groups are likely to be deficient with respect to the English language as well as ignorant of American history and the Western political tradition.