How far democracy should go
The Second Amendment can be amended. How do I know this? Well, if the process were not spelled out in the Constitution, I could take the repeated insistence of gun control advocates that as a nation, we could alter or remove the protection of civilian armament. I have in the past, for example, discussed Michael Moore’s call to do just that. And I am told on a regular basis that recent Supreme Court rulings such as the Bruen decision will only last until Democrats can get enough of the right people elected.
And fusion reactors are only always twenty years away. Or is it thirty? Fifty? Gun control nationally peaked in the early 1990s, and states such as California and New York have been struggling to maintain forward momentum, the latter having lost the aforementioned Bruen case and the former constantly shuffling and dodging to avoid seeing a swarm of lawsuits complete their journey to the highest court, but despite what feels like a constant barrage of mass shootings, there has been no large-scale movement to curtail gun rights—again, outside the states that already do this.
Those who support gun control blame the NRA’s donations to legislators, state and federal, but the reality is that if voters in most jurisdictions wanted things like magazine capacity limits, a semiautomatic rifle ban, or universal background checks, we would have them. And we would have an expanded Supreme Court to find such laws constitutional. A look at the state scorecard from the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, however, shows that gun control so far is a losing proposition, with many more than the thirteen states needed to stop a constitutional amendment receiving an F grade.
As I said, gun control advocates explain this as the result of the corrupt cooperation of gun manufacturers, gun sellers, the NRA, and lawmakers, and I am willing to let them believe this, as it keeps them from dealing with the results of a recent Pew survey that finds that three in ten Americans are gun owners and support for more onerous laws is not much above fifty percent—support that is still stronger than what is reflected by vote totals in elections in most states.
But Americans were against same-sex marriage before they became in favor of it, and if we leave rights up to majority vote, this implies a radical shift in how rights are understood in U.S. law. The framers of our constitution saw rights as something inherent in each human being—at least to the extent that they regarded an individual person as philosophically fully human—the first duty of law and government being to protect those rights.
One of the tedious exchanges popular on social media is the argument over whether the United States is a democracy or a republic, with the right wing insisting on a meaningful distinction between those terms. We are, of course, a constitutional democratic republic. Constitutional in that we have a written basic law; democratic in our method of choosing elected leaders, and republican because we hold it as a principle that power derives from the people, not from a deity or a monarch.
What people on the right often have in mind by rejecting the notion that we are a democracy is that we are not something akin to the ancient Greek city-states, particularly Athens, in which citizens in times of peace were eligible to vote on most everything. We are not, in modern terms, a direct democracy.
Such a thing was not even possible at the time of our founding, at least not for the whole of the country or for most states, given the geographical sizes involved and the facts about travel in that era. Today, with the Internet, we could have a system in which each voter invited to express a binding opinion on every matter, be it the route of a new road or a declaration of war.
Would we want such a system? Consider for example the ancient Greek practice of ostracism, a procedure by which anyone could be sent away from the city for a decade if sufficient votes for that penalty were cast. The reason for it was in part to act as a check on anyone who was seen as too popular or successful, but in practice, it could be a tool for removing a political rival, as seen in the maneuverings of Alcibiades, and in theory put the city at risk of becoming what we now see in reality television, voting being guided by tactical advantage, not by the best interests of the community as a whole.
In contemporary America, we see rights such as abortion, marriage, marijuana use, and gun ownership and carry subject to the political winds—i.e., to the whims of interest groups for and against each right or that perceive an advantage to be gained by being for or against—and this leaves all rights on a foundation of sand.
I would like to see more direct democracy where it is appropriate—where it can and ought to work. A company, for example, should have to pay attention to the ideas and desires of its employees at the very least, if not being in fact run by them. Communities should encourage the periodic gathering of a large portion of its members to discuss policy choices and collective goals. And while experts should be the voice we hear on matters of fact, what we do about the facts ought to be a choice made by the people who will live with and in those decisions. We certainly should make regular choices at set terms the leaders who will carry out those decisions.
By contrast, human rights should as a matter of principle be seen as outside the just power of the vote. Society deserves a say in how we interact with each other, the degree of that say being determined by the effect that these interactions have on all. But each person’s individual life should be treated as having an opaque barrier around it, permission to cross belonging solely to that person. In that realm, the opinion of the masses ought to have no force.