Democracy

Richard Weaver wrote that "the inability of pure democracy to stand for something intelligible leaves it merely a verbal deception."  In and of itself, democracy is a chaotic clash of individual wills.  It's good, then, that America's founders had learned from the shortcomings of the ancient Greek attempts at democracy.  Our own experiment in representative democracy has succeeded, to this point, by understanding our process merely as the best road available to take us to Higher Places.  But no form of democracy is an end in itself.

Tragic proof of this is now becoming evident to those of us who hoped (some form of ) democracy would compel middle east nations, especially Iraq, toward grander ideals that secure the kind of flourishing that America has experienced. It's becoming clearer by the day that those of us who held that hope were naive; miscalculating; wrong.

So we should not be voting merely for a candidate, proposition, or ordinance at the polls.  We should be voting for virtues.  Let's consider the timeless (as opposed the fashionable) values, ideals, and cultural ethos that the names or statutes on the ballots (hopefully!) represent. Though this should be obvious, I fear this connection between democracy and the bigger values gets severed by the searing attacks and senseless propaganda that saturate every election season.

Of course, my lofty concern for ideals must be tampered with an understanding that the kinds of democratic processes and the particular ideals at the forefront in, say, Kentucky, may (significantly?) vary with those in California, considering their respective challenges, opportunities, moods, and political situations.  So the grand experiment called the United States must allow democratic processes to play out within varying state contexts, with transcendent ideals inspiring us, not with opportunists tricking our minds, nor with despots whipping our backs. The federal government should  protect and contain our own democratic order in which the American experiment could continue to succeed impressively, as it has to this point.

But, despite the modern mood, not all values are equal.  Beware of wrong-headed idealists who value equality to the point of erasing our local and state distinctions; distinctions that necessarily create the texture of our American democracy.  Weaver also correctly observed, if "pure" democracy "promises equality of condition, it promises injustice, because one law for the ox and the lion is tyranny."