I believe that every citizen should sit down and read the writings of our Founding Fathers. Not just the important documents, like the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and the Federalist Papers, but their correspondence, journals, and other works. I have been indulging in this pasttime myself, off and on, for the last few years. It allows us to grasp more firmly the thoughts and intentions of the men whose decision-making forms the very basis for our system of government and social contract. One thing that becomes amazingly clear is how prescient they were.
Founding Fathers such as Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison had a good grasp of how difficult a pluralistic society would be to mold into a nation. Even more difficult, they seemed to know, would be the task of keeping that nation together in the face of disparate interests that would often times be at loggerheads with one another. I think it is interesting to note that the Founding Fathers were not thinking in terms of ethnicity, religion, gender preference, or even ideology, but rather in terms of state to state relations. They understood that such different interests (the easiest example being the industrializing North and the agrarian South) could lead to divisive conflict. And so, they laid the foundation for a complicated system of government with multiple checks and balances, not only to curb the power of any one branch of government but of any one state. Hence the Senate, where legislation and appointments go to win approval or death, and no one state is more powerful than another.
By failing to grasp this intimate sense of checks and balances and the delicate balance of powers, the Right proceeds like an overlarge child in a candy store, picking and choosing and willfully misunderstanding democracy. Instead, like that child, they seek to impose a "majority rules" understanding of constitutional democracy that would allow the 51% to act to the detriment of the other 49%. It is a lack of nuance, a complete inability to grasp complexity, that is demonstrated by naked power grabs, such as the attempt to do away with the filibuster (postponed, but not over by a long shot).
Arend Lijphart, a political scientist, has studied democracy for years. He studied many different democracies and their style of government and reached some very interesting conclusions. Lijphart found that the most successful democracies share three features: They were small in land, homogeneous in ethnicity/culture, and wealthy. Picture Belgium. Recognizing that this sort of finding wasn't going to be of much use to larger democracies such as the United States and United Kingdom, Lijphart also probed just what makes a larger, pluralistic democracy successful.
What he found was, again, telling. Successful pluralistic democracies have an elaborate system of checks and balances. In order for pluralistic groups to co-exist, the minorities have to be included in government decision-making. They also require a mechanism to prevent egregious decision making at their expense.
Adequate and fair resource dispersal is also important to unity in a nation-state. In small, homogeneous, wealthy nation-states, resource dispersion is fairly simple. In larger, more pluralistic ones, it requires more government involvement, but such resources, while gathered at what we would call a federal level should be disbursed at a local level (what we would call federalism).
The Founding Fathers began a nation of homogeneous ethnic background, but dispersed over a wide variety of ecoonomic interests and land. The ideological differences of the Founders would give rise to the political parties of today, but, at the time, partisan activity was looked upon with disdain. There were essentially two camps: those whose loyalties were to their colony of origin, or to the nascent nation as a whole. Jefferson and Madison are principle examples of the former, Adams and Washington of the latter.
The United States is a huge, pluralistic nation, and a very, very wealthy one. The welfare state that the Right rails against is an example of Lijphart's resource dispersion that makes democracies so successful. Where the welfare state runs into trouble, is when it is micromanaged at a federal level, where it is best left for the municipalities to spend the funds where it is most needed in their communities.
The United States is a nation of minorities. We come from different states, with different economic interests, from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, different socioeconomic statuses, and most importantly these days, ideologies and religions. Unfortunately, the Right appears to have never read Doctor Lijphart's studies, or, if they did, forgotten his findings. By disenfranchising ideological and political minorities, and by refusing to recognize that minorities of culture and class have different interests and perogratives (their avowed "colorblindness"), they could slam the lid on rules of governance and law that prevent democracies from collapsing.
-Jim
Cross-posted at Los Punditos.