“Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects”
Aristotle
America’s political system was built on the canons of democracy, equality and liberty. Yet, while each is vital to a free society, they are unique and strange bedfellows, frequently at odds with one another.
Liberty is essentially freedom from restrictions or controls. It implies a right to act as one chooses, providing such actions do not infringe on the rights of others.
Equality reflects a belief “all men … are endowed … with certain inalienable rights”. The Bill of Rights guarantees such rights can neither be eroded nor suspended by government, even when supported by majority of the electorate.
Democracy, on the other hand, is a form of government, wherein the express will of the people is exercised, either directly or through a system of elected representation. Its underlying premises of majority rule is “the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.”
Throughout most of America’s experiment in democratic government, these basic percepts have been in sharp conflict. Frequently, diverse groups of the citizens have been consciously denied equality and liberties through an express will of a democratic majority.
Our earliest permanent settlers, many of whom had fled religious and political oppression, regularly mistreated indigenous populations, regarding them as little more than heathen “savages”. During the ensuing two centuries, millions of human beings were involuntarily shipped to America where they were bought and sold as human chattel.
Political authority for such atrocities was vested in the hands of a white majority which prided itself on its democratic institutions.
With the adoption of the Bill of Rights, guarantees of many fundamental rights were finally defined and codified … for white males of European extraction. Slaves, Indians and, in many instances, women found themselves less-than-equals, democratically excluded from liberties enjoyed by the “majority”.
While most such nascent institutional injustices have been eliminated, Americans have periodically embarked on culturally or politically inspired democratic crusades whose effect have been to deny equality and liberty to “minorities” and those holding contrary views.
Peoples holding non-Christian religious beliefs; citizens of Japanese descent during World War II; at one time or another waves of Irish, Italian, Chinese and other immigrants; protestors of American foreign policy; and more recently gays and lesbians have all been the victims of democratically enacted laws and restrictions.
Still, despite its inherent flaws, democracy (paraphrasing Churchill) is the worst form of government ever devised by man … except for all the rest. Yet, It represents the best hope for societies to guarantee liberty and equality to all their citizens but only if those people remain ever vigilant and are willing to fight to protect those values, even for those with whom they disagree.
Tragically, in their efforts to reorganize American society … substituting parity of results for equality of opportunity and marketing promises of greater safety in return for “minor” restrictions on liberty … our governmental institutions are becoming the enemy!
The public should cringe each time a political leader asks us to cede just a little bit of freedom for a promise of increased security … as we are now hearing in the gun control debate. They should become extremely wary when the president holds up a credit card-sized identity card and tells us we’ll each be carrying one by the end of the decade … as part of health care “reform”.
Such simplistic solutions to complex national problems are convenient vehicles for reigning in liberties, while rarely working as advertised and predictably wasting our money!
At a time many societies are shedding authoritarian regimes and demanding less government, our beltway crowd, however democratically elected, is fanning the flames of larger, more costly and more intrusive centralized control over our lives. They simply disregard all protests of those who wish to be ignored by the benevolent “big brother” being created.
Democracy, devoid of protected guarantees of equality and liberty, will ultimately result in new and intolerable American apartheid, justified and maintained by a tyranny of the majority.
Lincoln noted in his First Inaugural, “If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might … justify revolution”.
