The abortion debate is over—settled by the democratic process. At least that’s what pundits are telling us.
On the Left, Michael Kinsley, anticipating the passage of the Freedom of Choice Act, has enthused that America will finally get a “democratically enacted choice law.” With it abortion will be guaranteed by that most sacred of democratic conventions: “the consensus of the citizenry.”
And on the Right, generally level-headed columnist Charles Krauthammer says that “the great national debate is over.… Democracy works.”
Democracy works? What does that mean? That a majority of citizens have cast their vote and so the issue is settled?
With all due respect to Krauthammer, Kinsley, and their ilk, this is not liberal, Western democracy as it has been classically understood. Democracy is not simply a mechanism for counting votes. (Our Founders recognized that such “pure” democracy could be as tyrannical as any totalitarian state, so they enacted checks and balances on unrestrained majority will.)
Democracy is more than a political system. It is a vision, a conviction of freedom and justice that depends not on the rule of the majority, but the rule of an idea. That idea is of a just society, “a more perfect union” in which life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness could flourish.
It is a vision based on several critical assumptions, however—ideas that we seem recently to have forgotten.
Who defines justice?
The first pillar of democracy is the desire of the citizenry for righteousness, a corporate aspiration to be a “good” society. This requires the cultivation of public virtue, which is dependent on a common value system rooted in absolute standards of right and wrong. Only a society that seeks virtue can ensure political and economic ...
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