...I have forgotten to mention that the same-sex marriage mirage is now "legal" in Florida (in case anyone failed to notice). It became so in early January. In 2008, 62 percent of Floridians (60% being needed) voted to keep marriage to one man and one woman. If the same vote were taken today, I would fear for the result. Last year, a federal judge, a guy named Hinkle, who hangs out in the Tallahassee area ruled the amendment unconstitutional. He put a brief stay on his order while Pam Bondi appealed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. I don't know what has become of that appeal (presumably denied), but I do know that the U.S. Supreme Court didn't think the preservation of marriage sufficiently important to extend the stay until they have ruled on the issue themselves. So one guy has changed the meaning of marriage for an entire state. One guy. The degree of hubris required of any man or body of men who fancy themselves authorized to redefine a thing of which they are not themselves the authors verges on the insane.
I'm prepared to believe that democracy is a wonderful thing, if someone can just tell me how democracy can fix this.
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Lydia
lydiamcgrew@yahoo.com
97.83.30.174
Submitted on 2015/02/20 at 10:21 am
I would say that you shouldn’t look to democracy to fix tyranny. That is to say, it’s quite obvious that democracy in this case happened to do the right thing and that judicial oligarchy has struck down those results. There is no more reason to blame democracy for that event or even to look to democracy to fix it than to blame democracy for the Gulag or for the unjust act of a king and to act why democracy doesn’t fix those things. This is the *overruling* of democratic results. Of course, democracy isn’t always guaranteed to do the right thing and sometimes does the wrong thing. But it’s just an error to blame democracy for an explicitly anti-democratic action by an official striking down a democratically passed statute which happened to be right.
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Lydia says:
February 20, 2015 at 10:22 am (Edit)
*ask why democracy doesn’t fix those things.
Zippy says:
February 20, 2015 at 12:39 pm (Edit)
Democracy considered abstractly in isolation isn’t intrinsically problematic. It is just a decision procedure.
But democracy considered in abstract isolation is not in any way connected to concrete reality. Egalitarian-majoritarian democracy and minority overrule of non-egalitarian results go hand in hand in any society which sees freedom and equal rights as fundamental — they are two sides of the same coin. Democracy is egalitarian unless it produces non-egalitarian results which restrict the freedom of minorities: in those cases it has to be overruled.
Under liberalism, democracy is the concrete ritual expression of equally distributed political power. Judicial intervention or something like it is a necessary concomitant to democracy though for adjusting to those cases when the majority chooses to violate the equal rights of minorities.
William Luse says:
February 20, 2015 at 3:20 pm (Edit)
But it’s just an error to blame democracy for an explicitly anti-democratic action by an official striking down a democratically passed statute which happened to be right.
Well, judges have their niche in the democratic system. There must be some kind of constraint on what a judge (or group of them) can do. If one of them goes morally berserk (which describes a lot of them right now) there ought to be some way to slap him down. Immediately. But we can’t. Judges are the final authority.
Zippy’s describing a system in which nothing is fixed, ever. Change of any kind is possible at any time, and it’s all a matter of who has the power or the votes to make sure that whoever wants access to that change can have it. The only thing that never changes is the premise that change must always be possible, and subsequently protected by force of law. It’s a great system. Especially if you like change and divine prohibitions are negotiable.
Lydia says:
February 20, 2015 at 5:06 pm (Edit)
“Well, judges have their niche in the democratic system. There must be some kind of constraint on what a judge (or group of them) can do. If one of them goes morally berserk (which describes a lot of them right now) there ought to be some way to slap him down. Immediately. But we can’t. Judges are the final authority.”
I don’t try to demand that anyone agree with me on this, but I am just going to point out that this fact is the result of an explicit attempt within our overall system to limit the power of democracy. Now, that structural limit may be a good thing or a bad thing in the abstract, or maybe just neutral, but that was the *intent* in structural concepts such as separation of powers, judicial review, and the independence of the judiciary–that “too much” democracy was a bad thing, and that judges needed to be in place to provide a check on the power of democracy.
Again, that is how the overweening of the power of the judiciary got here. Moreover, elected officials, in deference to those *explicitly* non-democratic principles, combined with a wrong-headed notion of the “rule of law,” defer to these berserk judicial decisions. It would be, in a very real sense, *more* populist for the elected state governors and other officials to put up every possible resistance–I’m not talking about armed resistance, but I’m also not talking about just appealing judicial decisions to higher courts. I’m talking about things like expressly refusing to comply with higher court orders that overturn duly passed state law. (This is the kind of thing Judge Moore is doing.)
Yes, there does need to be a check on the crazed judiciary. But it is not a structural flaw of democracy that there isn’t. It’s a structural accident resulting from factors that were already meant to be *anti-democratic* and to limit the power of democracy.
William Luse says:
February 20, 2015 at 5:22 pm (Edit)
I agree that Judge Moore is a great man, maybe the only one in sight.
I’m thinking a Christian theocracy. Are you with me?
Lydia says:
February 20, 2015 at 5:23 pm (Edit)
In other words, if anything, the overwhelming power of the judiciary, imposing as it does the values of the chattering classes in America, ought to be a warning of the dangers of unconstrained oligarchy, not of democracy. It is, in fact, a pretty *obvious* cautionary tale about those dangers. For example, most of those who would actually be the elite and would actually have power in a non-democratic or less democratic system are going to share the values of these judges. It is these leftist values that are taught in our most elite universities and imbibed by European princes with their Nannies’ bottle milk. In debates on this subject (e.g., with Jeff Culbreath) I have pointed out time and time and time again that vesting more power in an individual or small number of individuals who are not responsible to gain votes for re-election tells us _nothing_ about what sorts of values those individuals are going to use their power to promote. Presumably they will be whatever beliefs those individuals have picked up from their class, their advisers, their teachers and mentors. These might be very good or, as in the case of American judges, very bad. Hence, our rulers’ not having to run for re-election to office does not even *probabilify* better outcomes than their having to do so. And federal judicial decisions in America illustrate that very fact.
William Luse says:
February 20, 2015 at 6:36 pm (Edit)
So I guess you’d be against a Generalissimo Francisco Franco style authoritocracy.
What you’re telling me is that there is no fix for rule by oligarchy whatever form it takes.
Lydia says:
February 20, 2015 at 6:39 pm (Edit)
“I’m thinking a Christian theocracy. Are you with me?”
Only in the Eschaton, I’m afraid. But then it won’t be needed.
Lydia says:
February 20, 2015 at 6:42 pm (Edit)
“What you’re telling me is that there is no fix for rule by oligarchy whatever form it takes.”
There is never going to be an intrinsic and structural fix to human evil in any system. Systems qua systems can’t fix bad.
In the present case, you could either put a structural fix in (e.g., U.S. Congress can override judicial rulings by a 2/3 vote), or the systems of a given state could work in concert to oppose the oligarchy and hope the feds don’t send in guns.
Either way, as it happens in our present time, those would be attempts to have more democracy not less.
And it might work or it might not.
Lydia says:
February 20, 2015 at 6:58 pm (Edit)
Our country’s system as originally set up by the Founders was a brilliant shot at responding to the fallenness of man by a form of government. Meticulously balanced with checks and balances, a strictly constitutionally limited central/federal government, a hefty amount of state sovereignty, it was neither a democracy nor an oligarchy nor a monarchy. It was what Benjamin Franklin called it: A republic, if you can keep it.
It was a great try.
Now we have lost the republic. It has been subverted by those who cared nothing for rules or law or for limitations on power but who cared only to grab power wherever they could do so in order to advance their own agenda, which happened to be an evil agenda.
The republic was a great thing. Its death should be a sadness to all American patriots. But it would be a grave mistake to blame the republic for its own downfall, as though, had it been the “right” system of government, it would have been guaranteed to stand up against all attempts at power grabs, all lawlessness in rulers, all evil intent, all subversion. *No* form of government is that. The republic is not to blame for the fact that the republic has died. Those who deliberately killed it for their own ends are to blame.
The republic is to be mourned.
William Luse says:
February 20, 2015 at 8:08 pm (Edit)
That’s moderately eloquent. I could dispute that it is not to blame by repeating a discontent I’ve voiced in the past, but I’ll let yours stand out of whatever sense of patriotism is still left me.
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