THEY'RE FULL OF IT - LIBERALISM, THAT IS:

Transcript 805: Democracy Now? (NPR, Uncommon Knowledge, 6/24/2003; via PoliticalTheory.info)

Peter Robinson: So Don, this is an event, this march of democracy which should fill your heart with joy because it suggests that human society even far-flung places in the third world, human society can figure things out and grope toward systems that are just and successful. You're pleased with it? Right?

Donald Emmerson: Well, I'm pleased up to a point, only up to a point.

Peter Robinson: All right.

Donald Emmerson: Because if you imagine--just to construct a kind of extreme image here of what concerns me--a façade democracy in which elections give rise to the worst kind of demagoguery and populism in which all kinds of decisions are taken that actually routinely violate the public interest but in the name of the majority. And never mind minority groups and minority rights and those inalienable rights of the individual that a Supreme Court might protect. I mean, in this context, the Supreme Court looks like a pocket of autocracy. Who elected these people?

Peter Robinson: Nine unelected figures...

Donald Emmerson: Exactly. So I would argue as a liberal democrat that electoral democracy is really only a way station on the road to what you really want, which is a fully liberal democracy.

So a democracy of the people is vulnerable to the worst kind of demagoguery and populism and routinely violates the public interest, and therefore should be only a way station to a "fully liberal" democracy that features an autocratic Supreme Court? This helps explain why Senate Democrats require judicial nominees to be "fully liberal."

Posted by Paul Jaminet at November 13, 2003 4:34 PM