So it's looking like the undemocratic courts of California don't have the nerve to overturn the will of the people, who voted to end all same-sex marriages in our most populous state. Prop 8 is a great victory for Direct Democracy. But it's a great defeat for justice and sanity. This is no accident. I will argue that the case illustrates something deeper about the fundamental moral bankruptcy of Direct Democracy.
About the one nice thing that I can say about Prop 8 is that it's popular. It's also a pointless, divisive and unfair restriction of personal liberty which produces no gain for anyone under its jurisdiction. It's the modern day version of some familiar phenomena from the bad old days: The witch hunt, the lynch mob, the assembled villagers brandishing pitchforks and torches, outraged by something they don't understand.
In California, the villagers don't typically bring pitchforks and they don't march on the municipal courthouse. They just go to the ballot box. The hardware has changed, and the impact of their witch hunt has expanded, but all else remains the same. There's the reactionary populist firebrand, stoking the flames of outrage and appealing to what is worst in people. There's the play on the fear of the unfamiliar, which far too easy to turn into a will to persecute. There's the alarming feature of mob psychology, chillingly familiar from 1930's Germany, where a sense of invincibility and a confidence that "we can do anything!" fills the assembly.
In the bad old days, such mobs have done a great deal of damage to innocent people whose only "crime" was to appear different in some way. Women who stepped out of line were declared to be witches, brutalized and burned. Black men who got "uppity" were chased through American streets, their penises and testicles were ritually mutilated to great cheering from the assembled men, women and children, and then they were hanged.
The Californian mobs of the present day do nothing that is quite so chilling, though arguably, its impact is far broader. Before Prop 8 there was the passage of Proposition 187, which banned the providing of medical care to undocumented immigrants. In that case, California was rescued from this act of mob rule by its least democratic state organ: the court. The justices struck down the will of the people, and sanity prevailed.
At the height of the AIDS scare, Lyndon LaRouche almost managed to push through Proposition 64, which would have required mandatory AIDS testing throughout the state and would have classified AIDS as a "communicable disease" - legally justifying firings and other measures (including quarantining, feared many residents). We find such a proposal unthinkable today, and that's the point. Our perception of AIDS is no longer gripped by the 1986 cocktail of ignorance and fear. But Direct Democracy does not give a chance for hot heads to cool off. The point of the mob is that nobody needs to think things through. They can just vote with their limbic system. They can make law with just their limbic system. Is it any wonder that such laws are seriously lacking in wisdom?
Unwise voting also afflicts Representative Democracy. There, however, many handbrakes exist. Elected representatives are typically subject to checks and balances. They are responsible to a larger political party, which exercises a moderating influence on the most extreme of populist fearmongers. And importantly, before they make law, they have a chance to actually think things through, to work out the consequences, to have their name attached to it, and to have to defend its wisdom. None of these emergency brakes are present in Direct Democracy. To stop a popular prejudice from turning into collective catastrophe, only the courts can intervene. Of course, proponents of Direct Democracy find this deeply offensive: What right do these few, unelected oldsters have to overturn the will of the people?
This blog is a child of MyDD, which stands for My Direct Democracy. I always found it shocking that people with otherwise reasonable views could support something as insane and dangerous as Direct Democracy. I think I understand it better now, but it scares me all the more. It seems to me that these bloggers feel themselves to have mobs of their own, people self-selected to reinforce one another's prejudices. Like every mob, Daily Kos suffers from the collective illusion that they have all important things figured out, and that this great "policy" must be directly implemented. (Actually, Kos is not as bad as some other children of MyDD.) I should repeat: Every self-selected mob is convinced for just the same reasons that they are right. They stoke each other into a frenzy, soon growing to think that every sane person in the world would also agree with them, if only they knew what the mob knows. And since they take themselves to hold the "right way", they all think they should be in charge.
So Direct Democracy is the last logical step which is longed for by every such mob. It's the only legislative vehicle by which mob ideology can be rammed directly into government policy. The very thing that makes Direct Democracy such a bad idea is what makes it so alluring to bloggers on both wings of the political spectrum. This allure is fed by the perception that everyone in the country is either an actual or a "latent" Kossack (or Red Stater, or witch cleanser, or whatever). The latent mob members don't espouse the mob view only because of lack of information or moral insight, but they too could be brought on board if only they could be "reached."
If you, reader, are one of these people, I urge you to consider the actual fruits of Direct Democracy. With Direct Democracy, we wouldn't have a Kossack country. We would have a lynch mob country. And insofar as you are here for mob validation of your views, I strongly suggest that you spend more time with smart people who disagree with you, and less time with people who don't. It's the best way to keep your higher brain from being turned off and descending into the fantasy that our country should be run by your limbic system.