Red States: Blue States: The Fragility of Democracy
It is reported that as the delegates to the Constitutional Convention trudged out of Independence Hall in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787, an anxious person in the crowd inquired of Benjamin Franklin, "Well, doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" "A republic," Franklin replied, "if you can keep it. " The keeping of it is the subject of this presentation. The democracy brought into being on that historic day in 1787 was not judged to be imperishable, even in the eyes of its framers. The Constitution remains, but times have changed. If the Founding Fathers knew what they meant by "liberty," "law," and "God," that consensus does not prevail today. The ethic that launched the American republic has long disappeared. The nation is ideologically divided into right and left, conservative and liberal, symbolized by voting blocs, loosely designated "red states: blue states." Conservative voters in the red states outnumber those of a liberal bent; in the blue states the reverse is true.
Granted that political parties are polarized, has it not always been the case, and does it really matter? It matters because their differences today are not merely prudential, but are deeply ideological. We are confronted with antithetical views of human life and human fulfillment.
Orestes Brownson, the great nineteenth-century political theorist, and who, incidentally, is buried on the grounds of Notre Dame University, was prescient when, more than a century ago he spoke of what he called "powerful and dangerous tendencies" that he feared might split the country. He saw, on the one hand, the possibility of an excessive state power and its tendency to social despotism, and, on the other, the possibility of a destructive individualism leading to anarchy.
Other terms may be available to describe the situation, but the recognition of a deep division in the American electorate is inescapable. This is reflected even in the way scholars view the principles and historical sources that governed the American founding, a subject we will address momentarily. The ideological divide is sometimes dramatically evident in how we approach judicial appointments, foreign policy, immigration policy, and educational policy, to name only a few issues that affect the quality of life.
We call our republic a democracy. Some trace the concept of "democracy" to political life in ancient Greece where policy decisions were made directly by the populace as a whole, the majority determining the outcome. Today when we use the term, we usually have in mind representative democracy in which citizens exercise the right to form policy not in person but through representatives elected by them. In a constitutional democracy, such as those that currently prevail in Europe and the United States, the powers of the majority are exercised within the framework of a written constitution designed to guarantee the rights of minorities and the protection of other rights governing speech, press, and religion. A constitution need not be a single written instrument, as is the case with Great Britain, or even a legal document. It may be nothing more than a commonly accepted set of fixed norms or principles that are recognized as the fundamental law of the polity. The essence of a constitution is that it formalizes a set of fundamental norms governing the political community and fixes a limitation on the exercise of power. Political parties are the chief instrument through which the electorate is involved in both the exercise and transfer of power. In the United States we take all of this for granted and rarely reflect on how it all came to be.
Modern democratic ideas owe much to medieval ideas and institutions, notably those associated with the concepts of divine, natural, and customary law seen as a restraint on the power of kings, including the right to levy taxes. Accordingly, the king was obliged to consult the several "estates" or group interests in the realm. Gatherings of representatives of these various estates were the origins of modern parliaments that first appeared in America, Great Britain, and France. Representative parliaments, freely elected under universal franchise, became the key institutions of Western democracy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a matter of fact, few states in the modern world have constitutional arrangements more than a century old. Great Britain and the United States are almost alone in possessing constitutions that predate the twentieth century.
As the United States, like Europe, drifts from its Christian past into an unknown secular future, discussions of the pre-political foundations of democracy gain importance. Speaking of Europe, the principles both implicitly assumed and denied in the still-to-be adopted European Constitution are worthy of extended study, but my focus remains primarily with the American founding. The history of the American founding divides scholars who write on the subject. Some give primacy to the secular Enlightenment sources represented by John Locke. Others give weight to the religious milieu in which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with its Amendments were actually written. The latter acknowledge the influence of Richard Hooker, Roger Williams, and other Puritan leaders who are typically overlooked by those who insist on viewing the founding from an Enlightenment perspective.
The Calvinist theologian Richard Hooker (1554-1600) is remembered for his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which is regarded as one of the most influential work in the development of political theory from medieval political thought to contemporary rights theory. Hooker's work anticipated the political philosophy of Locke by more that a generation when, in emphasizing the notion of consent, he defined the church as "a company of people combined together by covenant for the worship of God." He taught that although fundamental authority may stem from God, power rests upon consent of the governed. Implicit in the doctrine of consent is the idea that the church is an instrument of the people created for purposes shared by each, an idea that when carried into the civil order fosters "government of the people, by the people."
Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was not only read in the colonies but had a profound influence on Locke as can be seen from Locke's many quotations of Hooker. But there is a major difference between Locke and Hooker, especially in their understanding of "contract" and "rights." The "contract" for Hooker is an expression of the corporate disposition as a whole, not the consent or disposition of the individual taken one by one. "Equality" for Hooker refers not so much to the individual's claim on the community as it does to the individual's equal obligation to the community. A case can be made that Hooker's arguments for the democratic organization of Church governance with its emphasis on consent served well the Founding Fathers of the new American republic. Those scholars of the left who ignore the Christian sources of the founding tend to emphasize the influence of Locke on writers such as Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. It may be that liberalism in America owes more to the theologies of Richard Hooker, Roger Williams, and John Wise than to the Enlightenment philosophy espoused by Jefferson.
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, Victoria, or Las Casas to find the immediate sources of the principles assumed in the American founding, yet their discussions of "natural rights" and "equality" laid the foundation of what was to come. These ideas played an important role in the American and French "revolutions." 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. Jacques Maritain will say, "The democratic impulse has arisen in human history as a temporal manifestation of the Gospel."
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, Mill warned, is not alone the 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.
Without judging the merits of the claim, something like this may have happened when the United States invaded Iraq at the behest of a small group of like-minded officials and advisers who had gained control of the levers of power to advance an agenda contrary to the interests of the country and one that had been repudiated internationally. So weak was the case for the military invasion of Iraq that the U.S. State Department sent five prominent Catholics to Rome to convince the Holy See of the righteousness of the war, a mission notably unsuccessful. Democracy, as Mill feared, may indeed be that fragile.
In the aftermath of World War II we witnessed in Europe another founding. A European Constitution was a distant future when the Christian Democratic Union was formed in Germany. At its formation there was no agreement in the CDU as to the meaning of "Christian Democracy." Maria Mitchell tells us in her study, "Antimaterialism in Early German Democracy," that Catholics and Lutherans were united 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 immediate postwar years Protestants joined Catholics in portraying the task of politics as the transformation of the secular society. "Inherent in political activity," explained Paul Bausch, a former member of the Christian Social People's Service, "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 one that respects God's commandments and makes them principles of life for the Volk and of the state." 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 writes, "Despite their agreement that only a Christian Germany could prevent the evils of materialism, Catholics and Protestants grounded their critiques in two 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."
Drawing upon the work of Simpfendorfer and 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 Gemeinscha ft. Emphasis on the individual inevitably leads to political liberalism at variance with the recognition of responsibility to a higher moral order. Catholic leaders in the CDU, Mitchell 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 public obscures the pre-political that de facto have given rise to the 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 conception — in the classical metaphysical sense — of nature and human nature. Western liberalism and Marxism alike ignore the spiritual dimension of human striving that only religion can provide.
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. Foremost is that of a politicized judiciary that bases its decisions on a "living constitution" rather than upon that Constitution adopted in 1787. Of equal seriousness is the public's docile acceptance of a bureaucratic imperium that affects all aspects of life, something that Bertrand de Jouvenel commented on while writing during World War II in occupied France. The Roosevelt administration was barely ten years old when de Jouvenel saw the damage that could be inflicted by newly created bureaucracies that at once possessed legislative, executive, and judicial power. The mammoth government we have today is the result of politicians rushing to solve "crises" by creating and empowering new federal agencies. There are many other ways liberty and the benefits of self-governance can be lost, certainly by the indiscriminate awarding of suffrage to illegal immigrants, by a politically biased media that limits coverage to that which reflects its own agenda, by excessive toleration of deviant (sometimes subversive) behavior and the concomitant failure to punish, and by the surrender of basic freedoms in the name of safety. The list could go on. It is not my intent to speak to all of these perceived threats to freedom, but some may be addressed, given our present theme.
In contemporary political discourse we hear much about the value of diversity, multiculturalism, and globalization, so much so that Samuel P. Huntington felt compelled at book length to answer the question, Who Are We? That book is subtitled: The Challenges to America's National Identity. And it follows upon another by the same author entitled, The Clash of Civilizations and the New World Order. The clash as Huntington sees it is between Islam and the West. The nineteenth-century "melting pot" may have successfully blended elements of Christian Europe, but in the twentieth century the melting pot has become a cauldron of unmeltable — not simply ethnics — but cultures. The Western liberal concept of democracy assumes that its citizens possess a common core of convictions, that men are naturally and morally equal. Starting from the premise that the United States once possessed a common ethnic core — one may say an Anglo-Protestant soul — Huntington believes that sometime in the period from 1920 to 1970, it lost that soul, succumbing to a liberal virus that sapped its strength. Seventy-five years ago, George Santayana employed the same metaphor in speaking of Christianity in the West when he wrote, "Our society has lost its soul. The landscape of Christendom is covered with lava: a great eruption of brute humanity threatens to overwhelm all the treasures that artful humanity has created."
Huntington is convinced that the United States remains an overwhelmingly Christian nation, yet he is not oblivious to the moral and cultural decline that he believes has weakened the moral fabric of the nation. He attributes the erosion not to gains made by non-Christian religions but to the increased influence of a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists, who in the name of multiculturalism attack the identification of the United States with Western civilization. America's multiculturalists reject not only their country's religious tradition but, in effect, its cultural heritage as well. In repudiating the inherited, they wish to create a country that does not belong to any civilization, one devoid of a cultural core. They substitute for the rights of individuals the rights of groups, defined largely in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual preference. The implications, Huntington shows, are enormous. Absent a common core of conviction, he asks: Can a nation maintain a rule of law? In the United States there may yet exist a common political creed, but Huntington is convinced that creed is not enough. Political principles, he argues, are a fickle base on which to build a lasting community. Shared belief in the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, and liberal free trade all presuppose something more fundamental. These ideas are European, he insists, not Asian, African, or Middle Eastern except by adoption. They make Western civilization unique.
Eric P. Kaufmann, covering much the same ground as Huntington, agrees that America has lost its Protestant soul, but he believes that such is a good thing, preferring instead the cosmopolitan multiculturalism that eradicates all religious and ethnic differences. Kaufmann is pleased that the older America has passed away and that its memory is almost beyond recall. He is convinced, contrary to Huntington's profile of contemporary America, that we have already adopted multiculturalism as the official ideology of the American nation. He finds overwhelming manifestations of the multiculturalist spirit in school and university curricula, in the social sciences, and in humanistic discourse as well as in our political and legal systems.
I chose "Red States / Blue States" as a symbol of the cultural divide confronting America. Perhaps I could have chosen Huntington / Kaufmann "debate" just as well. Their work leads to the conclusion that a weakened Christianity is confronted by a militant secular elite that controls the instruments of power. 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?" The answer from Rawls' perspective is that all sides need only embrace the principle of tolerance. But is tolerance really the answer? Presumably a tolerant society would be obliged to protect immorality as well as morality. Under such circumstances those who reject indifference to the good — "procedural democracy" it is called — are likely to desire a society where their own laws and customs are 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. To use one example, wherever Muslims are present in sufficient numbers, they choose to live under their own law of Sharia.
Toleration insofar as it implies acceptance of any and all goods proposed by members in a given society is more an abstract goal than a practical solution. It is unavoidable that some goals will be destructive of others, such that they cannot exist side by side without the state curbing some for the benefit of other. 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 it deems fair.
In fact, the promotion of tolerance as a virtue is often self-serving or indicative of a political agenda. Tolerance is not mentioned as a virtue by Aristotle or by the Stoics, nor does Aquinas speak of tolerance as a virtue. To the contrary, Roget's venerable English Language Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms gives as synonyms for tolerance: leniency, clemency, indulgence, laxity, sufferance, concession, permissiveness, terms generally regarded as designating questionable behavior. When tolerance is advocated in contemporary political discourse, it is usually a call for the abandonment of traditional norms of behavior.
Acceptance of the principle of tolerance unavoidably leads even its defenders to question its limits. How tolerant can a society be and still maintain itself in existence? Of course, where nothing is prized, everything can be tolerated. It would be easier to make the case that tolerance is a vice than to justify its putative status as a virtue. To employ a few homey examples, a parent cannot tolerate disobedience in a child, a teacher sloppy homework or cheating on an examination, a military officer insubordination, or a CEO deviance from company policy. A church cannot tolerate divergent doctrinal teaching or liturgical practice. The European Union cannot tolerate irresponsible fiscal policy on the part of its member states, nor any state permit disrespect of its laws. An entity must preserve its unity to preserve its very being.
Eventually the question has to be faced even by our secularized intellectual elites: Can Western institutions survive the repudiation or neglect of the sources that gave them birth? Friedrich Nietzsche, no friend of Christianity, recognized the issue. "It is an English inconsistency," he wrote, to be "rid of the Christian God" and yet "believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. They have forgotten that their morality stands or falls with faith in God. The English do not recognize that what follows the abandonment of their morality's guarantee is an expression of the strength and depth of the dominion of Christian judgment." Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics reminds us that a successful republic depends on virtue in the people and warns that a bad moral state, once formed, is not easily amended. The undisciplined will, whether it be that of an individual or a collective, is not capable of replacing the once unifying role that our country experienced under what Huntington calls "Protestant Christianity."
Who indeed stands to profit from the diminished role of Christianity? It should be evident even to the inveterate cosmopolitan multiculturalist that a polity cannot exist without virtue in the people. Has not the marginalization of Christianity been accompanied by a significant moral and cultural decline? What would Kaufmann substitute for biblical morality? The atheistic cosmopolitan multiculturalist in his revolutionary drive cannot help but bring to mind other cultural revolutions, e.g., that of the French whose drive for liberti, igaliti, fraterniti, once achieved, brought on the bloody scourge of the Jacobins, or that of the Bolsheviks, a revolution that was soon followed by Stalin's purges and gulags, or Mao's Marxist triumph that led to the cultural revolution and deaths numbering in the tens of millions. History seems to teach that leftist triumphs bring chaos and destruction in their wake. The political agenda of the left can only be implemented through coercion of one form or another.
John Courtney Murray, writing a generation ago and perhaps influenced by the position of Arnold Toynbee, held out little hope that an ideologically polarized America could survive the "new barbarism" of the left that he saw threatening the life of reason embedded in law and custom. The perennial work of the barbarian, he held, "is to undermine rational standards of judgment, to corrupt the inherited wisdom by which people have always lived, and to do this not by spreading new beliefs but by creating a climate of doubt and bewilderment in which clarity about the larger aims of life are dimmed and the self-confidence of a people destroyed." Murray in his own day feared the consequences of what he perceived as a moral vacuum and the loss of freedom to which it would inevitably lead. Today he would likely conclude that the prospects for the immediate future are not too bright. The concept, "West," he consistently held, has no meaning apart from Christianity.
* * *
(Dr. Dougherty is dean emeritus of the School of Philosophy, the Catholic University of America.)
This item 8012 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
