Democracy in decline
Carlin, David R. Jr.
DAVID R. CARLIN, JR. DEMOCRACY IN DECLINE Freedom exalted, self-rule diminished We have all heard by now that voter turnout in the 1996 presidential election was 49 percent of those...
...Third, the egalitarian factor: it practices at least three kinds of equality-equality before the law, equal access to a broad range of public goods, and social status based on achievement, not on accidents of birth...
...The economic gap between the better-off and worse-off, a gap that roughly corresponds to the education gap between the better-schooled and worse-schooled, has grown larger in the last couple of decades...
...First, the popular government factor: It is a political system in which the people, thanks to a universal franchise, have a significant voice in shaping government policy...
...First, local government has become less important as state and (especially) federal governments have expanded their scope and powers...
...In the meantime, personal liberty has been absolutized...
...1. Equality...
...Or it might have equality without either of the other two (for example, a Communist society...
...History provides plenty of instances of societies that prized personal freedom-for example, the pre-Civil War South and the feudal systems of Medieval Europe-while rejecting equality and popular government...
...It has become a sacred cow, an idol to which unqualified deference must be paid...
...Let's look at each of these...
...3. Personal freedom...
...and the very fact that freedom is not a common property but a rare privilege makes it all the lovelier...
...I've been inspecting American democracy recently, and I detect signs of trouble...
...As Edmund Burke pointed out in a 1775 conciliation speech, no one is more passionately attached to personal freedom than slaveholders...
...This may be illogical of them, since their freedom depends on denying freedom to many others...
...After all, the ideal of personal freedom has often flourished in caste-ridden and radically anti-egalitarian societies...
...They live in America without being of America...
...and for most people, of course, participation in government, if it is to take place at all, will have to take place at the local level...
...At the person-in-the-street level, this is seen in the cultural ideal of "non-judgmentalism," which, carried through to its logical conclusion, is tantamount to antinomianism or moral anarchy...
...In our case, the demographic big bang began with the exodus from cities to suburbs following World War II...
...America Two, the working poor and near-poor, is barely keeping its head above water, and even this would be impossible if it were not for multiple incomes coming into the household...
...The decline of popular government is apparent on a number of fronts...
...This double gap has been 'compounded by patterns of residential segregation, as the better-off have succeeded in putting more and more physical distance between themselves and their less fortunate fellow citizens, rather like the way higher-velocity galaxies have moved farther away from lower-velocity galaxies in the days since the big bang...
...But the links between equality and popular government seem more natural than the links between either of these, or both combined, and personal liberty...
...When we say a modern society is a democracy we normally have three factors in mind...
...America One is doing very well: good educations, good jobs, good incomes, good houses, good neighborhoods, good schools for its kids, etc...
...A society might allow for a high degree of personal freedom without popular government or equality (for example, a slaveholding oligarchy...
...2. Popular government...
...At the academic level, it is seen in the theory (of which Richard Rorty is the patron saint) that all pictures of the world are nothing but subjective "constructions," not controlled by objective reality...
...Our troubled health manifests itself in three symptoms: atrophy both in equality and popular government, and the hypertrophy of personal freedom...
...At the judicial level it is seen in the doctrine of "privacy," which has constitutional-ized the right to abortion and seems poised to constitutionalize the further right to assisted suicide...
...DEMOCRACY IN DECLINE Freedom exalted, self-rule diminished We have all heard by now that voter turnout in the 1996 presidential election was 49 percent of those constitutionally entitled to vote-the smallest turnout since 1924...
...Second, governmental power has shifted increasingly from popularly elected legislatures into the hands of unelected career bureaucrats...
...More likely it is a very bad sign, evidence that vast numbers of Americans are disengaging from the body politic...
...This may be a good sign, evidence that people are so delighted with the status quo that they feel there's no need to vote...
...Third, the federal judiciary, an unelected aristocracy with life tenure, has usurped many policy-making powers of democratically elected legislatures...
...but our democratic health is in decline, and if we don't do something about it, this decline could turn precipitous in the next generation or two...
...Or it might have popular government plus equality combined with a minimum of freedom (for example, the "tyranny of the majority" of which John Stuart Mill was so fearful...
...I recommend that the patient try a more balanced diet.more balanced diet...
...One is tempted to say that America is becoming "two nations" (to borrow Disraeli's subtitle to Sybil), except that it is more like three nations than two...
...from which it follows that we are all free to invent whatever world-picture we like while rejecting competing world-pictures out of hand...
...Fourth, the influence of grassroots political parties, which traditionally served as instruments and schools of popular government, has diminished radically, being replaced by the influence of special interests, most of them money interests...
...Second, the personal freedom factor: It is a society with strong guarantees for personal freedom...
...but however illogical, that is the fact...
...In the United States we normally assume that all three naturally go together...
...We describe the American political and social system as a democracy, but that's a shorthand way of capsulizing a complex set of values...
...We figure that if any one of them disappears, the remaining two will be in jeopardy...
...It is conceivable, indeed it is a matter of conspicuous historical record, that a social system might have one or two of these values without having all three...
...I don't say things are so bad that the system is about to collapse...
...America Three, the underclass, has long since gone under and is drowning in the stormy waters of social pathology...
Vol. 123 • December 1996 • No. 21
