TROUBLE IN DEMOCRACY

Democracy has served us well for over 200 years, but unfortunately it carries the seeds of its own destruction. Alexander Hamilton considered this in Federalist Paper 10, where he talked about factions. He thought that factions would tend to cancel each other out and that their ultimate result would be good. That presupposition has seemed to hold for a long, long time, but may well be crumbling now. Factions, now known as interest groups, have attained such influence and voracity that they have made it next to impossible to accomplish anything anymore. No matter what laudable effort is made to alleviate a social or political evil, some group immediately jumps in and claims to be harmed by the proposal or that it is contrary to some other equally laudable effort. And this struggle of faction and counter faction goes on and on regardless of the proposals advanced and so vigorous are they that in the end not only are no adjustments made to the status quo, but social discourse is damaged to the degree that civil society itself is threatened. Thus is factional discord the doorway through which power politics replaces democracy.

Similarly, with the Bill of Rights. Marvelous achievement in the history of governments, but now becoming more and more dysfunctional. Freedom of Speech, for example, is a most laudable ideal, but no sooner is it exercised by one group than another group claims to be harmed. Or the Right to Bear Arms, or what we now call Separation of Church and State, have been exaggerated to cover a multitude of areas never dreamed of by the Founders. Contention and confrontation have attained such dominion over Right that now we are on the verge of social upheaval over whether and how to exerise these ten basic Rights. This, too, is a struggle that can conceivably destroy our whole sociopolitical structure if we don't go back and learn to respect each other and to settle differences without trying to utterly destroy those with whom we disagree.