Jon Katz is upset because our upcoming election in the United States won’t express the direct will of the voters. To that I can only say, thank God. Too many of my fellow Americans are morons and I’m glad the system will subvert their will. Allow me to justify that extreme statement.
I live in an extremely poor neighborhood basically because the rent is cheap and it’s close to the university. Property values for non-rental units are rock bottom in my neighborhood. The city, in all its wisdom, decided a couple years ago that it wanted to reclaim the area and drive up property values so it pushed through a measure to designate where I live as a historic district. Crack dealers on the corner, abandoned buildings with all sorts of animals living inside them, but it’s a historic district.
So my wife and I go down to the hearing on the topic and point out that this is insane, and that the net effect of this would be to immediately stop ongoing repairs of houses and drive the current residents to the north side of Kalamazoo which is crack house heaven (very very bad place to live). To which several of the people get up and respond that that’s fine with them — get these renters out so the neighborhood can become populated by single home owners. Considering probably 70% of the houses are rental now, this was an incredibly obnoxious statement in our view.
The historic district passed and so did my predictions. The guy who owned the abandoned house with all the abandoned animals living in it started to remodel the place to rent it out, and stopped when the city told him the new historic requirements would pretty close to double the costs of the renovations, rendering the whole project unprofitable — except to the wild animals who appreciate the city’s help.
Katz might also note that in some polls large majorities of Americans would gladly restrict First Amendment rights. One poll I saw a few months ago show a majority of those polled felt newspapers shouldn’t be allowed to criticize government officials, for example (and maybe this is just a Midwest thing, but we do get people who will write letters to the editor complaining that the local newspaper shouldn’t endorse candidates for office because there is something improper about it — very bizarre).
Not to mention the large numbers of people who would like to see controls placed on the Internet because of things like pornography. Thank goodness we have many, many institutions in place to prevent such people from being able to convert their will into democratic action.
Katz’s piece represents what I like to call the fetishization of democracy. It ignores the fact that the Founding Fathers of this country did not see voting and democracy as an end in themselves but rather as a means to a separate good (namely reducing the likelihood of tyrannical government).
In many ways, America today is the dark side of the democracy that was envisioned by the framers of the Constitution where voting is now a tool used to pull the levers of state power in order to enrich whichever special interest can muster the most votes. The last thing Americans should do is encourage that trend.