"The spirit of the Parliament Act, and the purpose of that Act, were to secure the intimate, effective and continuous influence of the will of the people upon the conduct and progress of their affairs. That was the purpose—not the will of the governors or the governesses of the people, but the will of the people...
The right hon. Gentleman spoke about Parliament, about the rights of Parliament, which I shall certainly not fail to defend. But it is not Parliament that should rule; it is the people who should rule through Parliament. That is the mistake he made, an important omission...
All this idea of a handful of men getting hold of the State machine, having the right to make the people do what suits their party and personal interests or doctrines, is completely contrary to every conception of surviving Western democracy. Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made, Some patient force to change them when we will. We accept in the fullest sense of the word the settled and persistent will of the people. All this idea of a group of super men and super-planners, such as we see before us, 'playing the angel,' as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy. Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters." - Winston Churchill
I was talking to a friend about Citizens United, and she said she could not understand how a good person could defend it. And my response was almost automatic, because I've spent a lot of time thinking about that subject - that I don't think the justices and people who support Citizens United are bad people, I think they do not believe everyone should have the equal right to vote.
And since then I've been thinking about that.
(Technically, he called it an "Aristocracy of Virtue and Talent" and went on at length about Beauty being one of those talents and all other kinds of pomposity, but the dude was still onto something.)
I was taken with the idea of a government ruled by an Aristocracy of Virtue, and went on about it to Professor Franco, who (as per usual with his extraordinary talent in a world of political philosophy to say the most important things, succinctly), "But Emily, who decides?"
Yep. Who decides. How does one go about discerning virtue? Because we all have our own compass, and people on different parts of the political spectrum would surely differ on the criteria by which to judge virtue. And in a large, diverse, populous country, how could one expect to build enough agreement on virtue to move forward with an aristocratic class, without some measure of tyranny?
And that brings me back to the famous, oft-shortened quote from Mr. Churchill.
Democracy is about giving voice to all, and trusting that people have both the ability and desire to rule themselves as wisely as they are able. That's rough sometimes. And if you go back and look at America's own history of enfranchisement and disenfranchisement, you'll see that even our Founders didn't wholeheartedly subscribe to this theory. They started with land-owning, white men.
Our collective political culture has come to revere democracy and freedom. There isn't, necessarily, agreement over what those terms mean, but they are valued by Americans. The love for democracy, writ large (and not, for example, bounded by the fact that what we actually have is a representative democracy - which is why Jefferson called his party the Democratic-Republicans) has become entrenched - so entrenched that it's not okay to say out loud that you don't think everybody should get the same vote.
But that, to me, is what Citizens United and its ilk represent - a desire to return to the Founders' concept of a group of people who are "invested" in the country, and therefore entitled to a greater say in its direction. It's not okay to say that, so we get a bunch of talk about money equaling speech and very little concern for the ways in which love of money has utterly corrupted our democratic republic in the past.
Is that bad? I think so, but here's the problem - while we are pretending that this isn't a power play to ensure greater political power to a moneyed, elite class of people, we aren't actually talking about the real issue. We aren't talking about whether everybody should have an equal vote. We dance around it in our political rhetoric - populism versus 53%/47%-ism - but we aren't having the real argument. And we should.
No comments:
Post a Comment
I'm happy to hear any constructive comments, but will remove anything profane or reductive.