Theodore R. Johnson posted a thoughtful pre-election op-ed in the Washington Post titled Black voters are joining a coalition. It’s always a gamble. “Black voters,” Johnson writes, “must always wonder whether their partners at the ballot box will remain partners after a victory” :
Black voters keep a watchful eye for these signs. Their trust in democracy — both the system and the people who operate it — is hard-earned. For them, choosing the right coalition partners has not been just a question of policy wins but a matter of life and death. The same system that legislated slavery and Jim Crow became the tool that secured rights and opportunity. This checkered past gives their politics a pronounced pragmatism, rooted in an understanding that Black people in America fare best when the federal government makes civil rights a priority. Their numbers and political solidarity give them electoral power — valuable even to those who might despise them.
My emphasis highlights a crucial philosophical observation that begs the question: “Is the American system both the ‘system that legislated slavery and Jim Crow’ and the system that protects civil rights the same?” Are they even compatible? Put differently, did the Founders create a Democracy, which means unlimited majority rule with our individual rights determined by vote? Or did they create a constitutionally limited republic that limits democratic power and prioritizes individual rights, which means rights are unalienable and thus outside the authority for any electoral majority to infringe?
I posted these comments:
Democracy wouldn’t have to be a gamble if American principles are adhered to. Yes, democracy can enslave people or subjugate them under segregation. Or it can liberate them, all based on the vagaries of electoral outcomes. Democracy unconstrained by constitutional protections for individual rights is fundamentally totalitarian. That’s democracy.
But it’s not America.
America is the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes that fundamental intellectual, political, and economic individual rights to life, liberty, and property are equal and universal, are unalienable, and precede government. A constitution based on these principles protects us from the three basic governmental manifestations of tyranny identified by James Madison; the tyranny of the one (autocracy), of the few (aristocracy), or of the many (democracy). The U.S. Constitution, despite its flaws, is intended to implement these principles and thus secure our liberties by limiting the powers of the government.
That’s why it’s crucial to recognize that America is a constitutionally limited republic, not a democracy. Slavery and Jim Crow—and, now, the steadily encroaching “soft” tyranny of the regulatory welfare state—result when people calling themselves Americans abandon the Founding principles, and declare that America is a democracy. But no one’s rights should ever be determined by majority vote. We must recommit to the principles of the Declaration and the legislative power-limiting intent of the Constitution so that elections no longer have to be a gamble on our civil liberties.
Related Reading:
America; Democracy or Republic or Both--Why it Matters
Abortion Rights and Majority Rule
Constitutional Republicanism: A Counter-Argument to Barbara Rank’s Ode to Democracy
Mesmerized by Elections, the NJ Star-Ledger Forgot that Tyranny is Tyranny
The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur
QUORA: Why does the Pledge of Allegiance say the USA is Republican not Democratic?
Senator Mike Lee is Right: America ‘is not a Democracy’
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