Liberalism Vs. DemocracyEssay Preview: Liberalism Vs. DemocracyReport this essayIn writing the Constitution the founding fathers attempted to synthesize the calls of the Declaration of Independence—ideas of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—to protect individual rights with the desires of democracy to develop collective self-government. The intricate system of checks and balances was designed for the purpose of preserving this sense of equilibrium between liberalism and democracy; however, as the nation has matured—through refoundings and periods of crisis—this stability has often vacillated. Today, Milkis and Landy suggest that the public faces distinctive challenges in balancing liberalism and democracy resulting from a new sense of factionalism and a growth in the administrative state. These challenges have manifested themselves through the political culture, the evolved and competitive roles of institutions to protect individual liberties, and through the impacts of crisis situations; American history has been a narrative describing how these forces and institutions have abetted the competition between liberalism and democracy. New factionalism and the growth of the administrative state have tipped the scales in favor of liberalism to the point where Milkis and Landy question if we have lost our ability to conduct democracy. Although an increased awareness of individual rights hinders collective self-government, it does not erase the fundamental principles that maintain a proper balance between liberalism and democracy. As the events of 9/11 have demonstrated, democratic principles still play an integral role in protecting the common good.
America will always face the challenge of mediating the wants of collective self-rule and liberalism due to the very nature of American political culture. The character of the citizenry of the United States was founded upon the revolutionary principles: a fierce sense of individuality and a sense of distrust towards governmental authority. Without the people’s tenacity to pursue liberalism, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of an eminent tribunal” (532). Yet were America’s founding principles based solely upon liberalism, the rise of factions—“A number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community” (68)—would cause what the founding father’s feared most: tyranny of the majority. This would occur because in pursuing their own interests, without considering the common good, majorities would suppress the liberties of other citizens by advancing only their own rights. As Landy and Milkis suggest, a balance between liberalism and democracy is imperative to prevent factionalism so that collective self-rule can facilitate the protection of individual liberties and ensure the lasting power of representative democracy. The brilliance of the Constitution is that the system of checks and balances tempers the wills of tyrannical majorities.
The way in which the Constitution’s design fosters the balance between liberalism and democracy lies in its foundations upon the people. Under this system, the rights listed in the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence were supreme but the citizenry still recognized the democratic needs of the government to protect the common good: “They sought to craft a constitutional system that followed the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which taught that interests could be compromised but that the rights of вЂ?life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; were sacred and must be inoculated from interests and democratic sentiments” (534). Milkis and Landy hold that this balance between the competing notions of liberalism and democracy has shifted back and forth over time; however, since the New Deal, the scales have been tipped in the favor of liberalism. Under their view, the people no longer look to the Constitutional institutions promoting collective self-rule to protect their liberties; rather, there has been a rise in the power of non-elected government institutions—the courts and executive agencies—to administer these rights. Recent controversies have exemplified this trend: “But the debate over affirmative action, even when joined to other issues such as voting rights and welfare reform, has not aroused a popular struggle of the magnitude of previous contests over civil rights and liberties. This debate was joined not in the streets, the ballot box, or the halls of Congress, but in the federal court” (531). As exemplified by the Rights Revolution, the introduction of programmatic rights in the wake of the New Deal, and debates such as affirmative action, the American public is more concerned with defending their individual rights than holding to the democratic principles that were the basis of the Constitutions claim to collective self-rule. Democratic ideologies are on the decline because rather than taking collective action through protest or voting, the citizenry looks to the growing administrative state to defend liberalism.
The rise in the administrative state has led to a new sense of factionalism in America. Contrary to the ideologies of the federalists and James Madison—who believed that a large democracy would create so many competing factions that none could achieve tyranny of the majority—individuals clamoring for their rights have limited government autonomy and the deliberative institutions that the public votes for and influences through democratic processes. The new factions that have sprung up are resultant from people no longer looking to Congress to push for reforms, they appeal to unchecked and unelected branches such as the courts and executive agencies to defend their liberties: “new factionalism has been aided by the lowering of the вЂ?legitimacy barrier,’ meaning the constitutional hurdle that must be crossed to justify a transfer of decisions from the private to the public realm” (541). Factionalism upends the balance between liberalism and democracy because it
mothifies society, and makes it more effective. The more liberal the government, the longer and deeper the bureaucratic process will run, and the less the public has to bear the risk of making the necessary compromises or making a compromise. Indeed, the first rule of factionalism, and perhaps much of the Second Amendment, would have been to reduce the political power of the state as well as of the federal government through an efficient application of the federal government’s power of judicial review, as Justice Samuel Alito rightly warned in 1795. In fact, Alito suggested (by way of a footnote) that this strategy would be an “abridgment and diversion of all power from the legislature of the United States to the hands of the legislature of other States” (1799), the power of our state government to order, enact, veto, block or even regulate the conduct, actions, business practices, and activities at which it operates.
9. The government can choose whether the executive or judicial branch of the federal government, or of the executive branch of the federal government, is to conduct its activity in these areas (1799: 15–16; 1797: 17). (1) This is not a new concept. It should also be noted that the United States constitution codifies the constitutional authority of many of our own governments when it grants our nation the power to legislate according to a set of principles, and to impose its views on other countries. In fact, our Founding Fathers, like Theodore Roosevelt by the time of Charles Lindbergh, regarded political party leadership as a “monopoly” to maintain. (2) As we shall see, the concept of “monopolism” began as early as the New Deal. When the British Crown sought to govern their colonies, they first challenged the British sovereign state and then a federal state. In 1820 the British Federal Court ruled that an executive or judicial branch of the federal government could not be the “ultimate arbiter” of state power because of their monopoly of the “executive power”(1823).
10. However, in recent years there has been considerable discussion among historians and commentators concerning the role of the federal courts in the development of this concept of factionalism. Such debate has been centered on the Federalist Papers, a collection of 19th-century documents written by the Supreme Court’s opinion in the cases affecting the federal judiciary and on the issues of constitutional interpretation. The National Conference of State Legislatures has taken a number of historical readings of the Federalist Papers and the Federalist Papers (22), and concluded that the Federalist Papers are “mere, but hardly any longer, authoritative evidence, even in matters so deeply affected by the events occurring at the time.” (1798: 3–18) The central contention of the National Conference of State Legislatures is that state judicial decisions on such issues as the Constitutionality of the Fourteenth Amendment were passed at least as early as the twentieth century (1824). (4) It is important to note that the federal courts in 1792–1793 established the United States Supreme Court by statute as an arbiter of the Constitutionality and in every subsequent Constitutional Convention. In a series of decisions, the court and the states, and the federal courts throughout the country in their constitutional interpretations of the fourteenth amendment, have repeatedly stressed their authority when they are interpreting the Constitution. Among them have been Presidents of the United States, Representatives of the United States from various states, Senators and Delegates, members of Congress, and, most recently, members of the Senate. The court is often represented by members of the American Bar Association, United States Bar Association, United States Bar Association, United States Bar Association, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (1912) and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (1945).