The fragility of democracy

Modern Age, Spring, 2006 by Jude P. Dougherty

Universal suffrage, given that it rests on the doctrine that all men are naturally equal, may be the undoing of modern democracy. It is not simply a matter of recognizing that however unequal citizens are with respect to their actual condition that their inequalities can be ignored or at any rate made irrelevant through their equal standing before the law and the abolition of privilege. That doctrine rightly asserts that whatever differences exist in race, language, religion, political opinion, or personal and social conditions, all citizens are peers in human dignity and before the law. Equality, thus construed, means nondiscrimination, a positive value that no one disputes. But equality as a principle is distorted and perverted when used to confer on the illegal immigrant a claim equal to that of the citizen with respect to public benefits and when used even to give the convicted felon voting rights equal to those of the law-abiding. Equality so construed is unjust insofar as it ignores the greater economic and social contribution of the law-abiding citizen and his rightful claim on the common wealth.

Access to information is another factor that can undermine the electoral process. With both academic and media elites at war with the intellectual tradition that brought the nation into being, it would take a well-informed public, better educated than that which seems to prevail, to resist the political demands of the same academic and media intelligentsia that control the major media. It remains to be seen whether the electorate can withstand the unrelenting assault on its inherited beliefs and still make good decisions. Informed decision rests upon the availability of information. The deconstructionists with their rewriting of history, abetted by the willing assistance of major university presses, have obscured if not expunged the Christian sources of Western civilization. We witness a cultural war between a militant atheism confronting a weakened Christianity, a conflict that many are reluctant to acknowledge.

John Rawls, in his celebrated volume, A Theory of Justice, raises the relevant question: "How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical and moral doctrines?" (14) The answer from Rawls's perspective is that all sides need only embrace the principle of tolerance. But is toleration really the answer? Presumably a tolerant society would be obliged to protect if not to cultivate immorality as well as morality. Under such circumstances those who reject such indifference to the good would eventually desire to form a society of their own, where their own laws and customs would be honored, thus repudiating or undermining the goal of a single, stable society. In fact, we see religious and ideological differences rending societies from Indonesia to Ukraine.

Toleration insofar as it implies acceptance by society of any and all goods proposed by its member, is more an abstract goal than a practical solution. It is unavoidable that some individual goals will be destructive of the goals of others such that they cannot exist side by side without regulation whereby the state curbs some for the benefit of others. But by such curbing, the principle of toleration is breached. The state will necessarily act in the light of some norm that is dependent on some concept of fairness. Either the state offers equal opportunity to all, or it adjusts opportunities in the interest of certain courses of action deemed fair.