DEMOCRACIES THAT FIGHT FOR THEIR SURVIVAL DO NOT CEASE TO BE DEMOCRATIC BECAUSE THEY FIGHT

“There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

– Justice Robert Jackson, 1949.

Marc Schulman and Dave Schuler, two bloggers for whom I have the greatest respect for the thoughtful and serious way they approach the momentous issues of our time, have jointly zeroed in on the most troublesome issue facing the United States, Britain and the West: How does a Democracy effectively fight an enemy who can recruit our own citizens to commit atrocities and still remain a democracy ?

At the American Future, Marc Shulman has had many fine posts on this quandry since the London bombing but one that touched a nerve with Dave was entitled ” The Enemy Within“( I also strongly recommend reading Marc’s latest-“Three British Op-Eds” and “A Deadly Double-Standard” ). A post that dealt with the left-wing British newspaper, The Guardian, coming to the belated realization that the War on Terror might be someting more than a public relations exercise by ambitious Straussian neocons. An excerpt:

“The realisation that Britons are ready to bomb their fellow citizens is a challenge to the whole of our society. One security source I spoke to yesterday, before the police revealed their findings, presciently guessed that the culprits were “a UK group, home-grown, having bypassed al-Qaida training camps”. He reckoned they would have drawn on the pool of young Muslims so disconnected and disenfranchised that they are easy prey to the extremist sermons heard in some mosques, to the wild, conspiracy-theory packed tapes sold outside and to the most fire-breathing websites. The proliferation of that material represents a deep challenge to British Islam; that disconnection and disenfranchisement is a challenge to Britain itself.”

This in turn provoked a response from Dave at The Glittering Eye that he characterized to me as a ” lament”, a post entitled “The limits of diversity; the end of ” E plurbus unum”?”. I am loathe to excerpt Dave’s post for fear of distorting his point about our own internal divisions over the nature of the enemy we face (hint- go read it all) but here is the crux of his response to Marc:

““We hold these truths to be self-evident…” These words are from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence and demonstrate that our republic was founded on a consensus. Or, as Chesterton put it, it was founded on a creed. This consensus included the notions of unalienable rights, popular sovereignty, consent, constitutionalism, separation of powers, morality, and limited government. But the consensus also included the concept of natural law and a belief in the role of reason in human affairs.

…The recent terrorist attacks in London raise yet another challenge to our society. As more is learned about the nature of the perpetrators of the attack a picture emerges of young men in such profound disagreement with the fundamental values of the society in which they found themselves that all they asked of it was its destruction. And their own.

…Can we reasonably doubt that this kind of anger exists here as well?

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