Is Democracy a Moral Good?

Joe Biden

President-elect Joe Biden snagged a narrow majority in this month’s elections, but what’s that worth? As the lame-duck president’s continuing legal challenges keep the transition to another administration in paperwork limbo, I start hearing chants from the left, demanding that electors honor the people’s will. Give us democracy, they demand. The people voted for Joe Biden, and Biden should become President!

My distrust of “the will of the people” comes from experience. In 1992, the first year I could legally vote, I lived in a Nebraska town so far west, we were more culturally beholden to Denver than Lincoln or Omaha. For readers too young to remember 1992 politics, that was the year Colorado passed Amendment 2, a voter-backed initiative that wrote a clause into the state constitution declaring that sexual orientation would not be a protected status for civil rights purposes.

Back before the Internet and social media carefully pre-screened everyone’s news sources, I got my world and national news in 1992 mainly from the Rocky Mountain News, a now-defunct paper. Therefore I had opportunities to witness this debate unfold in real time, but no opportunity to participate. This distant, almost god-like perspective, has influenced my opinions of what constitutes “democracy” and “justice” ever since.

The arguments regarding Amendment 2 broke down into two camps, who couldn’t resolve their differences because they weren’t speaking compatible languages. Defenders of the amendment claimed to represent democracy. The initiative passed, they repeatedly reminded the public, by six points, wide enough to be considered a “mandate.” Why, they demanded to know, can’t Colorado just honor the will of the people?

Opponents didn’t engage this argument. Rather, they insisted that the amendment was simply wrong on constitutional grounds, holding that it contravened the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law to all persons. Amendment 2, they admitted, didn’t make anti-gay discrimination mandatory; it simply held that legal protections didn’t apply to LGBT persons. And that was wrong.

Thankfully, I could watch the debate unfold with cool detachment, unable to vote in Colorado. Because I couldn’t reconcile the two arguments. Raised in a conservative household, where the political language of the Cold War remained hotly reactive, I believed in America’s two great guiding principles, Democracy and Justice. And the two seemed irreconcilably opposed in Colorado from 1992 to 1995. Until somebody said something that broke the tie.

“The will of the people in George Wallace’s Alabama was for segregation, too.”

A 1993 protest regarding Amendment 2 (source)

This statement, in an unsigned Letter to the Editor in the Rocky Mountain News, flipped a switch for me. I realized, in ways I hadn’t before, that Democracy is only a second-tier moral good. The will of the people only matters when it promotes justice. Sadly, history—and not just American history—teems with evidence that democracy doesn’t necessarily honor justice. The people’s will can bend toward iniquity.

Conservative writers love observing that the word “democracy” doesn’t appear in the Constitution. That’s because America’s Founders distrusted democracy, which, as classically educated aristocrats, they associated with ancient Greek city-states. Early Greek democracies were little better than well-organized street gangs, ruled by whimsy. That, I realized, had happened in Wallace’s Alabama, and in 1992 Colorado.

Amendment 2 became a benchmark in LGBT rights, the first sexuality case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1995. In an unusual 6-3 ruling, the court sided with the 14th Amendment argument, holding that the popular will comes second. The people cannot vote for discrimination, bias, or exclusion; justice, to exist, must include all Americans. Though courts and legislatures have wavered in practice, this principle remains definitively American.

Watching the current debacle, it appears the sides have reversed. Progressives, eager to dispatch the lame duck, shout: “We won, it’s over, move on.” Conservatives want to prolong the debate with claims, mostly debunked, of widespread injustice. The ramifications of this reversal are weird and bleak, with conservatives promising to uphold justice by demolishing democracy, which hardly seems a reasonable compromise. But still.

The unintended consequence here, is that Democrats are relinquishing the argument from justice, while Republicans redefine “justice” by keeping specious claims alive long enough to seem reasonable. Both sides are making themselves weaker by failing to engage the debate. Those who already fundamentally agree with one side, have no reason to change their minds, because the other side keeps talking past them.

We teach children daily that America is a country of “liberty and justice for all.” It’s time we start acting like one.