Complications of American Democracy: Elections Are Not Enough

The American democracy is a very complicated one. The Framers thought that three major features were critical to the working of our democratic institutions: free elections, separation of powers with checks and balances, and government limited by constitutional guarantees, especially those in the Bill of Rights. The aims of this essay are to remind the reader of how those complica tions were justified by the Framers, to raise implicitly the realization that ex porting democracy to other lands is not just a matter of having one set of free elections, and to comment explicitly on whether some traditional characteris tics of American democracy have come under serious threat. A pessimistic reading of developments would argue that we are already on the way to govern ment by an elective tyranny of the majority that violates checks and balances and the rights of the minority. The more pessimistic reading is that this tyranny of the majority is even trying to impose the doctrines of religious conservativ ism on officials and on the public in direct violation of the First Amendment and of the constitutional provision barring religious tests for holding public of fice. And feeding that pessimism is the absence in 2005 of any major political or public leader with the courage and self-interest, as John F. Kennedy had in 1960, to take on this religious right head-on and say, as Kennedy did during his campaign, "I [do not] look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test?even by indirec tion?for it. If they disagree with that safeguard they should be out openly working to repeal it."1