Once again I find myself with so many things to write about, but I have opted to reply to a message I came across on social media a few weeks ago. The author - I cannot recall who he was - expressed a dislike of democracy. He said he preferred republicanism, and his argument was along these lines: In a democracy, my rights can be removed according to the wishes of the electorate; but in a republic my rights are protected by a constitution. I will assume that the author was an American national.
I have written in a previous thread about mortocracy, which I define as government by the dead.
Nowadays, democracy is normally envisaged as government according to the will of the people, as expressed at the ballot box. Mortocracy is government according to the dictates of people who are no longer alive. Examples of mortocracy include the Geneva Convention, which was most recently ratified in 1949.
The USA has a written constitution which cannot easily be amended. According to Wikipedia:
A proposed amendment becomes an operative part of the Constitution as
soon as it is ratified by three-fourths of the States (currently 38 of
the 50 States).
By contrast, the United Kingdom has a constitution which is not written in any single document, and which can be amended by any act of parliament - passed on a simple majority vote.
The constitution of the USA can be interpreted by judges, and it is normal for judges to the supreme court to be appointed on the basis of how they are expected to interpret the constitution. In a sense this is vaguely democratic. The people elect the president, who then appoints judges to the Supreme Court. Nevertheless it is at best a bizarre form of democracy.
I recall once complaining that a federal judge in the USA had acted undemocratically by overturning the policy of an elected body. Someone replied that the ruling was democratic as it arose from a lawsuit brought by local people. The logic of that escapes me.
I recall also once remarking in a debate that a federal court ruling had been overturned on appeal. Someone replied that he could wait for the Democrats to return to power and - as he put it - reassert the constitution. I asked if he thought it proper that a Democrat administration should interfere in the judicial process, and he replied that the ruling in question was the work of judges appointed by a Republican administration. I then asked him if under a Democrat administration all appointments to the judiciary would be politically neutral, and he conceded that this would not be the case.
When people in the USA bring lawsuits based on the constitution, they will often argue that they are defending the constitution, but I wonder if any one of them truly cares about the constitution.
For example, proponents of the misnamed American Civil War argue that the constitution did not allow any of the states to leave the Union. In that it was utterly undemocractic, as each of the eleven states which left the Union in 1861 did so by the will of their elected politicians.
However what proponents of the misnamed American Civil War rarely admit is that the misnamed American Civil War was by that logic a violation of the constitution. If the states were not allowed to secede, then the citizens of those secessionist states were still technically American citizens. The war deprived many of them of their lives, but in most cases without the privilege of trial by jury, which is guaranteed by the constitution.
People who support government by written constitutions are almost certainly not truly interested in democracy, and are almost certainly hypocrites. I am proud to be a democract, and not a mortocrat.
Related previous posts include:
What is mortocracy?
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