Fighting for democracy who is the we in we the people

George Saito: Fighting for Civil Rights George Saito grew up playing football and serving as a boy scout, an all-American childhood for the son of a Japanese immigrant. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, life would change for Saito and his family. The family was forced to live in an internment camp, forced to give up their home and their business because of their Japanese ancestry.

Both George and his brother Calvin would make the ultimate sacrifice for their country. He was assigned to the first Filipino Infantry regiment where the harshness of war inspired him to teach future generations that there was another way. His wartime experience would inspire him to dedicate his life to teaching tolerance. Women Airforce Service Pilots. Lee gave her life in service to her country in Carl Gorman: Fighting for a Voice Carl Gorman was regularly beaten and punished by his teachers for speaking his native Navajo language as a child.

But in the Marine Corps, the language he loved was used to save the lives of his fellow Americans. It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few—as we have learned to our sorrow. What then is the spirit of liberty?

I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten—that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side-by-side with the greatest.

There is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit.

To defend it may be to lose it; to extend it is to strengthen it. Democracy is not property; it is an idea. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions. If they approve the proposed Convention in all its parts, I shall concur in it cheerfully, in hopes that they will amend it whenever they shall find it work wrong.

The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance.

In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.

They are construing our constitution from a coordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.

Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.

The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country, for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which, in proportion to our population, shall be double or treble of what it is in most countries. I try to get something. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do.

It is a call to an untiring effort. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. I want every man to have [a] chance. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

William F. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people. I favor freedom—you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion. Public life gradually falls asleep. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. Justice is the end of government.

It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be, pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. A coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place upon any other principles, than those of justice and the general good.

The minority could negative the will of the majority of the people. They could extort measures by making them a condition of their assent to other necessary measures. They could obtrude measures on the majority by virtue of the peculiar powers which would be vested in the Senate. The evil instead of being cured by time, would increase with every new State that should be admitted, as they must all be admitted on the principle of equality.

The perpetuity it would give to the preponderance of the Northern against the Southern Scale was a serious consideration. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson that religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of government.

The inefficacy of this restraint on individuals is well known. The conduct of every popular assembly, acting on oath, the strongest of religious ties, shews that individuals join without remorse in acts against which their consciences would revolt, if proposed to them separately in their closets.

When indeed religion is kindled into enthusiasm, its force like that of other passions is increased by the sympathy of a multitude. But enthusiasm is only a temporary state of religion, and whilst it lasts will hardly be seen with pleasure at the helm. Even in its coolest state, it has been much oftener a motive to oppression than a restraint from it. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.

Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive. In form and in substance it emanates from them.

Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them for their benefit. It is the creature of their own will, and lives only by their own will. Our country is our home, the home which God has given us, placing therein a numerous family which we love and are loved by … a family which by its concentration upon a given spot, and by the homogeneous nature of its elements, is destined for a special kind of activity. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Mencken also attributed to Alfred E. No officer of the law may set that law at defiance with impunity. All the officers of the government from the highest to the lowest are bound to obey it.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew. Generally speaking, the attractiveness of this argument derives from the value of autonomy that it serves to spell out in a particular area of action, and also from the ways in which it overcomes the founding paradox of democratic theory hinted at above and described further in the next section and thereby explains how democracy is possible in the first place.

If we are to conceive of democratic legitimacy without being entrapped in paradoxes, the idea of foreign powers as cofounders of democracy is not only a theoretical possibility, it is a necessary assumption. In this article, the basis for this thesis—that the founding of political order can be democratic—includes a substantive and consequentialist theory of the good of individual and collective autonomy.

Supporting the same conclusion by exclusive reference to a normatively thinner theory of procedural democracy would yield a more generally acceptable argument. As we are concerned here with international politics, that is, a context where the possibility and legitimacy of procedural democracy are often questioned, the values and reasons organized into a pure procedural theory of democracy are insufficient to discriminate between action alternatives preferred by many political actors.

Procedural theory recommends specific decision-making procedures, not particular decisions. In any case, the practical implication of my argument is not that every process of democratization that involves foreign actors is preferable to all internally driven processes of democratic positive change.

Such practical assessments depend on empirically contingent questions of what actors do and how they decide it. It does follow from my argument, however, that external sources of political change is not, by definition, less democratic than internal ones.

Much of what we know about politics is sufficiently evident as to escape our notice most of the time: political orders are not eternal and never the same in different places; social groups that rule in one state may be ruled over in another; collective action may be more or less effectively regulated by law.

But who determines what shape the political order will take in a particular case? In this article, the term is not intended to name anything more specific, or anything more mythical, than the capacity to determine the particular form of the definitional characteristics of a state or of a political order more generally, such as its territory, citizenry, and authority structures.

The assumption of a constituent power is not unimportant, though. By thinking there is some agency behind the fundamental principles to which people subordinate much of their public lives, we are able to extend the notion of moral and political responsibility to cover what would otherwise be conceptualized as the outcome of arbitrary historical forces.

If there are constituent powers, the importance of defining and assessing their claims to legitimacy could hardly be exaggerated. Theorists have often sought to identify the constituent power in terms of a subject, such as a people, a nation, or a dictator.

However, we will avoid a range of demanding empirical assumptions if we choose to focus, more abstractly, on whichever political processes can possibly embrace legitimate constituent powers.

Where should we look in order to find them? A source of legitimacy can be located in the past, in the present, or in the future of the political time for which legitimacy is claimed. In those terms, constituent powers can be thought of as belonging to both the past and the present.

Some contract theorists think of constituent powers as belonging to a more or less fictional past, when the state of nature was transformed into one of civilization, while others see those powers as located in the present, as the political order must be continually reconstituted in parallel with the changing composition of the people, as well as with changes in constitutional norms.

Constituent powers of the former kind are typically visualized in processes that establish national boundaries and political institutions, as well as in the composition of a written document which describes that order. In the latter sense, constituent powers can, perhaps, be thought of more easily as operating in processes of socializing people so that they comply with the existing order, or in human actions which uphold or alter it, such as participation in electoral or educational activities.

Instead of a continual process of sustaining a constitution, the intervention by a foreign power is a unique rupture and renewal of political relations that will, in the future, be looked back on as a turning point. Constituent powers imagined in the past of the political now or in a political now that is constitutive of the future may be referred to as operating at the beginning or the origin of a state, regardless of whether the constituent power is internal, external, or both.

Thus defined, the concept of constituent power has not found an evident application in normative theory. The difficulties are typically referred to as paradoxes, 9 a few variants of which should be distinguished. From a legal perspective, laws are legitimate if they originate from within a constitution.

But why, then, should the constitution itself be seen as legitimate, as it does not have the same origin as the laws? And if, by this question, we are pushed to admit the necessity of a constituent power, how could such power be given any legal justification at all?

But how, then, can the decision to establish the political order be legitimate? But if this is so, why should we regard the people itself as legitimate? In some senses, the paradox derived from democratic theory poses a more severe difficulty than the legal and the republican ones. The legal paradox may itself be solved by referring to the constituent power of a people, 14 which would then presuppose that the democratic paradox can be solved.

By contrast, the difficulty of deriving democratic legitimacy from a people, which can itself make no analogous claims to legitimacy, will remain a serious issue as long as democracy is a dominant political value, and the problem of delimiting political communities has not reached a universally acceptable solution.

Indeed, the problem has been described as unsolvable in theory. Among the unsuccessful attempts at solving the democratic paradox is the idea of locating the foundational moment in ancient times. This is worth recognizing since the historically influential theory that attributes constituent powers to the nation, 17 or any other prepolitical group, is untenable for precisely this reason.

Among the normative resources of the concept of the nation is that it can exist before and independently of the state; hence, the question of who should participate in the making of a legitimate state has an obvious answer—members, and only members, of the nation. However, moving backward in political history does not solve our problem.

Rather than a paradox regarding the constituting of democratic states, we would be faced with the same difficulty in the constituting of nations or some other group. If the nation is the source from which governments can derive democratic legitimacy, how could the process in which the nation was constituted derive legitimacy from the same source?

If the nation itself has no democratic legitimacy, how could it confer such legitimacy on a state? Once again, we would be stuck with the paradox of deriving legitimacy from an entity that did not exist at the moment when legitimacy must be derived.

A more recent, still unconvincing, attempt at solving the foundational paradox conceives of constitutionalization as a learning process; as time goes by, people may detach themselves from their primordial beginnings and build their identity on the protection of human rights within and beyond their own political structures.

First, to the extent that the content and moral standing of human rights are politically contested, human rights can provide no source of legitimacy for the political boundaries within which those human rights were established. A controversially founded political order does not become less controversial because it leads on to a still controversial protection of human rights. Second, even if human rights were, in fact, universally recognized and implemented everywhere, which they are not, a retroactive justification of a beginning does not produce any guidance with regard to the legitimacy of contested foundations that take place today and in the future.

Whatever the general merits of retroactive justifications of constituent powers, their application is limited to states founded in the past. For anyone interested in the legitimacy of the ongoing and future efforts at creating the new political orders addressed in this article, theoretical attention must be directed elsewhere. A third unsuccessful attempt at solving the foundational paradox is to rely on unanimous voting among the people who will constitute a legitimate state. The reason for resorting to unanimous voting may derive from dissatisfaction with majoritarian procedures.

If people are born free, how could it be right that the majority decides and forces its will on the minority? The only condition under which this can be right is if every individual has agreed to the use of majority voting in the founding of the state. However, this theory does not cover the situation that the group of individuals, which was permitted to participate in the unanimous decision, could and perhaps should have been composed in some other way—either that someone who was, in fact, included actually should have been excluded or that someone who was excluded should have been included.

This risk would perhaps not trouble the future citizens of the state, all of whom must agree with the way in which the people is delimited for a state to be founded at all; however, it will be a devastating objection against the legitimacy of the state in the view of people who remain outside. Those people will have little reason to accept the existence and effects of a state founded by a process from which they were excluded. It may be noted, as well, that the negative conclusion remains if we add to the idea of unanimous voting the idea of voluntary association.

Your preference might have been to dispose of the resource, to which you have a justified claim, on your own or within some other constellation of people. Likewise, the possibility of seceding from an association is an insufficient condition for the legitimacy of that association, since those who secede may have as justified a claim as those who remain to the goods of the original association. What we begin to approach is the conclusion that the paradox of democratic beginnings will remain unsolved as long as we presume that a people is founded only by itself.

Self-founding is not the only theoretical option available, though. Alternatively, the notion of a democratically legitimate people may be defined as a people recognized as such by, or justified in the views of, even those who will not play the role of citizens in the state about to be constituted.

That is the condition under which states, indeed, can be conceived of as democratic on the basis of how they were founded. At the level of ideal theory, each individual in the world should have the same opportunity to require founding justification via political procedures of the political order not only of his or her own territory but also of the political orders of other territories.

If that criterion is fulfilled, no later complaint about the states that do exist can be justified by reference to an unfair delimitation of the demos at the moment of founding. For then everyone, from the outset, will have been treated equally. The people will be legitimate by implication of the same principle, political equality, that justifies decisions made democratically once the people has been founded.

It will be noticed that the solution to the democratic paradox suggested here is extremely idealized. The argument appears to assume that people are endlessly willing to recognize the equal right of all humans to constitute legitimate. This is a completely unrealistic assumption yet needed for the principle suggested in the previous paragraph to do its job, that is, to explain the possibility of democratic beginnings.

On the other hand, we have also made completely unrealistic assumptions about what kind of justification will be needed, namely, that every state in order to be legitimate must be justified via political procedures open to every individual in the world. This is an opposite idealization that makes the problem more difficult to solve than it would be if we accepted what most of us would be ready to believe in other practical contexts of normative reasoning.

What we tend to accept in other practical contexts, I believe, is that some kinds and levels of coercion of individuals are acceptable, e. Such less demanding premises of normative justifiability would indeed be relevant in this case; recall we are concerned with the real thing of constituent powers, as manifested in territories like Iraq or Kosovo, not some idealized theoretical construction serving to elucidate one argument or another.

The move from an ideal to a real level of normative theory implies that an absolute criterion is reduced to an ideal of approximation as more practical considerations enter the discussions as resources for explaining the possibility of democratically legitimate political beginnings.

How, then, should the above principle be specified for the purpose of providing guidance on what states should be established? Here we face a dilemma of thin and thick conceptions of legitimate politics. On the one hand, people should be as free as possible in deciding even the grounds on which the establishment of a state may be seen as legitimate. This view may ultimately lead into a strict consent theory of legitimacy, according to which there are no assumptions at all regarding the preferences of the individuals whose consent establishes a state as legitimate.

This second position may lead us ultimately to adopt a substantial moral theory according to which all individuals should pursue aims of happiness, security, or some other good—a theory which may imply, under some additional assumptions, that the people need not be consulted in the first place—whereby we would certainly have left the domain of democratic theory.

A middle position is available if we focus on the concept of autonomy, defined as the range of alternative actions—performed individually or collectively—available to the individual while free from domination by other actors.

A principle of democratic founding based on this concept will not predetermine what founding choices people should make in contrast to consequentialism while it still does not refuse the responsibility of normative theory to guide individuals in difficult cases in contrast to consent theory. There are various ways in which a theoretically defined normative ideal can be sufficiently simplified so as to guide political action.

Another method is to introduce different principles motivated by different practical problems and then to introduce some meta-principle to mediate between them, as when the maximin principle is used to motivate unequal distribution in a particular case, i. Without having the space necessary for critiquing these methods here, I will suggest a more traditional, strictly quantitative and empirically contingent way of turning the ideal of autonomy into a practically useful criterion: the founding of states is democratically legitimate if it provides as much autonomy as possible to as many people as possible.

The introduction of an empirically contingent quantitative element—as many people as possible AMP —in judgments about what foundational decisions are democratically legitimate can be supported in two ways. First, it is democratic in the sense that, if applied within a given group of people, it yields the same outcome as the standard principle of political equality one person, one vote. In both cases, simple majority rule has a prima facie justification.

In contrast to the principle of political equality, though, AMP does not presuppose a predefined group of individuals among whom political power is equally shared. Two persons should count for more than one person according to the criteria of democracy; however, it is only with the criterion of AMP that two groups should ceteris paribus count as more than one group, and that the larger—out of two predefined groups—should prevail over the smaller.

Ability to explain the capacity of democracies to implement their decisions is a particular strength of a theory applied in a postsovereignty context, where states are not necessarily legitimate or even capable actors, and where a critical background assumption common in democratic theory—that states can implement their decisions because they are states—no longer holds.

Following these basic justifications for a definition of democracy in terms of the AMP criterion, the definition may be further specified in view of its implications for morality, authority, and politics.

With regard to morality, the central question is: Who should be included in the people of a given political order? On the basis of said principle, those people should be included whose inclusion yields as much autonomy as possible for as many people as possible, counting the autonomy of people inside as well as outside the political order.

The implementation of this idea raises several difficulties for foreign interventions which can be mentioned here only in brief. A legitimate intervention of state A into the affairs of state B requires, under the above principle, that B constrains the autonomy of people inside or outside its own boundaries, and that the actions of state A serves to free people from that domination by B.

With regard to authority, the question is: Who should decide who should be included in the people? Moral philosophers might want to reduce this question to the previous one and proclaim that those should decide who are the ones most likely to reach the morally desirably outcome, be they a well-armed and self-appointed elite or a political mass movement.

Democratic theorists, on the other hand, might wish to develop a procedural theory of authority with no explicit claims as to what should count as the right decision; for instance, it may be contended that the boundaries of particular citizenries should be decided by humanity as a whole. On the basis of this view, the question of authority is, indeed, secondary to the question of morality as some moral philosophers might have it , while a subordination of authority to morality implies, in this case, a decision, directly or indirectly, by humanity as a whole as some procedural theorists might see it.

Maximising the autonomy of the people in a single decision, all alternatives to people-wide inclusion e. The distinction in this argument between, on the one hand, autonomy in one particular decision and, on the other, autonomy over longer time periods of decision making, is critical.

While it is plausible to think that everyone gains autonomy from inclusion in decision making as long as we limit our concern with autonomy to the particular decision made, autonomy with regard to public life on the whole may still decrease when accounting for the effects of involving all people in all decisions continually.

Because of potential trade-offs between autonomy and participation even of representatives of all people, maximal inclusiveness of people in politics may need to be limited to the most fundamental political decisions. In view of their long-term effects, however, founding decisions are very likely to deserve inclusion in that category of most fundamental decisions. The last question, then, about politics, is: Can we expect that people will accept decisions made in ways that reflect the principle that founding decisions should let as many people as possible be as autonomous as possible?

For moral values to play a political role of fostering compliance with decisions, an additional assumption may be that there is a minimum of political communication within the group of people whose autonomy may be strengthened by the designated political procedure, so that the gains of one group can be recognized also by others.

Alternatively, the political question can be answered without reliance on the binding force of a shared morality, by resorting to the classical defense of a social contract, namely, that the alternative to compliance is a state of anarchy. Democracy, defined here as the largest possible group of people acting together, is then conceived of as a sufficient power for establishing the desired political order.

A challenging question implied by this notion of democracy is whether democracy in this sense can be reflected even in realist foreign policy driven by national self-interest. Given the controversial but common premise that world politics today offers no other more inclusive alternative for decision-making than what is provided by the states system, it would appear as a democracy in kind.

The interesting implication is conceptual, not empirical. The legitimacy of international relations and of domestics politics can on the above notion of democracy be conceived of as depending on one and the same question, namely whether the practice allows inclusion of as many people as possible in politics. In procedural terms, perhaps the most difficult conflict in democratic politics concerns the distribution of citizenship.

If two groups of people disagree over who should be included in, or excluded from, a particular state, the conflict will not come any closer to solution by democratic elections or referenda among the conflicting parties. As noted in the paradox of democratic founding, such methods presume that the issue of inclusion has been solved already.

However, while democratic elections among conflicting parties are not applicable, the possibilities for democracy have not been exhausted, as this concept has been interpreted above. Democratic principles may be seen as being approximated, permitting a procedural solution to the conflict, if the issue in such cases is decided by external powers alone, that is, by people whose inclusion in the procedure will not itself represent one position in the conflict.

There are three interrelated reasons why such an arrangement may contribute to democracy. First, a democratic decision to constitute a particular people must be open to participation also for people who will not be included in that particular people, once constituted; this has been argued at length already. Second, a foundational decision taken by foreign powers may be a last resort in cases where inclusion of the conflicting parties in the political procedure would undo the political process in the first place.

If foreign powers act democratically, in the sense of taking all interests into account and making themselves available for public scrutiny, the process will—with all its limitations of democracy—be more democratic than if the issue is relegated to power struggles on life and death between internal actors themselves.

Third, by letting external powers make the foundational decision it is possible to retain the majority principle, for the procedures through which the foreign powers make their decision. This is important for all of the standard reasons in favor of the majority rule, for instance, that majority rule is neutral between decision alternatives, and so forth.

To celebrate a historical event, when it is worth celebrating, may serve to transcend a sense of pain and meaninglessness in the present and to re-create—through rituals, symbols, drugs, and so on—a moment when human life was rich, happy, and worth remembering.

Likewise, an illegitimate origin of a state is obviously bad, threatening at any moment of conflict to re-create such feelings of humiliation and despair as border on political violence. However, such reflections have not much impressed political theorists concerned with legitimacy or justice in the last decades or even centuries.

Political legitimacy has been explained, rather, as deriving from the ways in which decisions are made within an existing association, 30 from the content of such decisions or their effects, 31 or both.

For instance, the original position 33 and the state of nature 34 are surely not intended as blueprints for political practice in the founding of new states but, rather, as instruments for assessing the legitimacy of a state already constituted. This tendency in political theory certainly may proceed from the position rejected in the previous section—that the foundation of democracy cannot itself be democratic—but also from a view that the origin of a democratic state is, in any case, normatively unimportant.

If the constitutional alternatives, which are open at the constituent moment, will be equally available for democratic deliberation and decision making at any later point in time, then it is legitimate to question why we should bother about how it all started. Would not the best alternative be to get the constituting of states over and done with as soon as possible in order to permit democratic procedures and just outcomes to begin producing legitimacy independently of how democracy once began?

The vulnerable point in this argument is found in the arbitrariness of the premise, namely, that the constitutional alternatives present at the constituent moment will be equally present even in the future. This is simply not true. Direct and representative forms of government, proportional and majoritarian elections, age limits of citizen rights, the size of constituencies and the boundaries between them—all these are issues which, once decided, will bias the constitutional structure against the alternative not chosen.