Should majorities rule?
Almost all Americans — and most people in the roughly 50 percent of nations the watchdog organization Freedom House classifies as democratic — support limits on majority rule in theory.
These are the checks and balances familiar from Civics 101. In practice, vetoes of mass verdicts are much less well-received, and in times of economic distress, when populist clamor increases and the public search for scapegoats intensifies, they can lead to vilification, rage and backlash.
All signs are that we are entering such a period of angry populist excess in the United States. How our institutions stand up to these pressures could determine not just the future of our democracy, but also that of the American economy on which the material well-being of voters depends.
One recent signal of “constitutional strain” comes from Arizona, where voters overwhelmingly supported two bills, SB 1070 and HB 2281, which effectively instituted racial profiling and banned history courses critical of white civilization.
Among others, Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu characterized these laws as a nascent form of anti-Mexican apartheid. When Justice Susan Bolton found that sections of SB 1070 violated the Constitution, she was inundated with death threats for violating the will of the Arizona people.
A similar, if somewhat more muted reaction met Judge Vaughan Walker this month when he overturned voter-approved Proposition 8 in California, which would have restricted same-sex couples’ rights to get married.
As with the Bolton decision, what enraged everyone from the defense lawyers to Rush Limbaugh and National Organization for Marriage, was that a “monarch in robes” would have the gall to overturn the pronouncement of the voters.
Ted Olsen successfully argued on Fox News that this is, of course, precisely the constitutional role of the judiciary. However, the ruckus continued.
But perhaps the most disconcerting harbinger of popular fury — troubling because of what it could portend for world politics — comes in the form of the fierce outcry over the mosque that the Cordoba Institute wants to build near ground zero, and the backlash against President Obama when he tried to stop the mass hysteria.
The Cordoba Institute’s mission statement is available online. Reading it can leave little doubt that the organization’s sole reason for existence is to promote peace. Projects that the organization has focused on include opposing female genital mutilation and fighting sexist dress codes, such as the burqa.
The Cordoba Institute is about as close philosophically to al-Qaida as the American Civil Liberties Union is to the Nazi Party of America. Believing that the proposed mosque represents a Muslim fundamentalist victory is downright crazy: Timothy McVeigh loony; deluded as the people who think the moon landings happened in a Hollywood studio. Yet that hasn’t stopped Republican leaders from accusing President Obama of “being out of touch with the mainstream” for his support of the institute’s right to build its community center.
As students of history know, such explosions of blind prejudice often are symptoms of economic pain. The suffering of Weimar Germany led to Hitler and anti-Semitism. Apartheid arose from the impoverished Afrikaner shack-dwellings of the Depression.
Yet populist scapegoating also is a cause of economic decline.
In a global village, no nation can afford to unnecessarily alienate a billion moderate Muslims, hundreds of millions of gays and lesbians and one of the world’s most dynamic and growing nations along its own southern border. Populism’s economic gains, where they occur at all, are almost always temporary.
The irony of the populist backlash against individuals such as Susan Bolton, Vaughan Walker and Barack Obama is that more aggressive intervention by a “monarch in robes” at the Federal Reserve might have, in fact, done a good deal to prevent the economic crisis that is causing such widespread suffering.
As is widely acknowledged now, but was certainly not at the time, had Alan Greenspan deflated the housing bubble by raising interest rates, we would not have landed in our debt crisis.
Yet as anyone who lived through the bubble years in Miami or Phoenix will attest, if Greenspan had done such a thing in 2002, he would likely have been publicly excoriated.
Popular support for the housing boom was all but universal. Cocktail party talk revolved around how everyone was getting rich.
Being told back then that we couldn’t use our houses anymore to fund our retirements would probably have been about as much fun as being told today that we aren’t entitled to enact into law our prejudices.
In the long run, though, both might be equally critical for the world we’ll live in.
Glen Retief of South Africa teaches at Susquehanna University. His memoir, “The Jack Bank,” will appear in April.