Patrick McSweeney


 

Democracy as National Religion

Contemporary Americans worship democracy and majority rule. They forget that the United States also is a republic, which imposes checks and balances against the tyranny of the mob.


 

Democracy has become the state religion of the United States. Americans, by and large, extol it with great fervor. Many of our leaders, including President Bush, are committed to spreading it around the globe. And we respect no political process that isn’t based on the concept of one person, one vote.

 

It’s about time we put this democracy thing in context. If we don’t turn a jaundiced eye to the extreme view of democracy, we are likely to find ourselves caught in the political paralysis the French have brought on themselves.

 

For weeks, tens of thousands of workers, students and other Frenchmen have taken to the streets of their cities to protest a new law intended to reduce France’s apparently intractable youth unemployment, which is 22 percent nationwide and as high as 40 percent in some urban areas. To encourage employers to hire young workers, the law makes it easier for employers to fire workers under 26 years of age.

 

In a recent editorial, the Wall Street Journal described this French stalemate as a symptom of an ailing democracy. This kind of popular protest was minted in France, beginning with its 1789 Revolution and, more recently, in the May 1968 student revolt and last fall’s violent protests in the suburbs of Paris and in other urban areas.

 

Signs of democratic excess aren’t confined to France, of course. Our own national spending orgy, the opposition of Jesse Jackson and others to any elections in New Orleans unless and until democratic perfection can be assured and the thousands of local fights over zoning where democratic processes are hijacked by NIMBY opponents are simply representative of a pattern. If numbers of people can be mobilized to achieve a political objective of whatever kind, you can bet an organizer is poised to seize the opportunity, regardless of the negative impact on property rights, political and social stability or the economic health of the community.

 

One such project to exalt the extreme version of democracy as the guarantor of the Good Life is the Campaign for a National Popular Vote, which seeks to neutralize or circumvent the ancient Electoral College that adherents to the new national religion despise so intensely. Their battle cry: “Vox populi vox Dei.” (“The voice of the people is the voice of God.”)

 

This devotion to government by plebiscite is what led France to the Terror. It is leading government at all levels in this nation to dysfunction. Responsible citizenship, self-reliance and mature decision-making are being displaced by interest group politics, manipulation of political and governmental processes for selfish ends and lawmaking calculated to appease the most shrill and well-organized.

 

It is often close to mob rule. Political pandering no longer offends most voters. They demand it.

 

The generation of Virginians that contributed so significantly to the American Revolution, a new Virginia Constitution and, ultimately, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be appalled by politics in the 21st century. Although those Virginia leaders of the 18th century were almost evenly split between Federalist and Anti-Federalist sentiments, they all shared the view that, for our government to function well, the extreme version of democracy — government by plebiscite — must be rejected. For them, civic virtue, limited government, self-restraint and self-reliance were essential to good governance.

 

Virginia is moving away from those values toward a form of governance we will soon regret. What the lesson of present-day France should teach us is once we enter that New World, turning back is mighty difficult.

 

-- April 3, 2006

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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