Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, apparently burdened by a parochial ideology that overwhelms his reasoning ability, has recently repeated his idea that tyranny of the majority is acceptable in our democracy as long as the victims of that tyranny are not specifically protected by our Constitution.
The problem is that this is not a joke -- it's serious business and potentially dangerous. Justice Scalia seems to have forgotten that the American Revolution was a revolution against tyranny of any kind and not a revolution to install a tyranny of the majority.
Maybe he can be forgiven his forgetfulness, since most Americans also forget. We have an inclination to ignore or deny history, a truly dangerous habit.
To carry Justice Scalia's proposition to its absurd conclusion, it would, according to Justice Scalia, be perfectly in accord with the Constitution to have laws passed legalizing the killing, cooking, and eating of women and children simply because women and children have no explicit specific protection in the Constitution's articles and amendments. According to Justice Scalia, if the majority decides to enact such legislation, so be it. He would not oppose it. Ipse dixit.
Tyranny is a social madness, whether it occurs, as it did recently, in Cambodia, the Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany -- or whether it occurs on a small scale in the nuclear family. In Ancient Rome, for example, the father of any household had the legal right to kill any of his children at will -- no reasons necessary, no questions asked.
My favorite example of the madness of tyranny occurred in France shortly before the American and French Revolutions. In the mid-18th century, the punishment of lunatics who broke the rules revealed the essence of French society under the monarchy. In the year 1757, Louis XV, forty-seven years old, was King of France. On Wednesday, January 5th, as the king was about the enter his carriage outside his Versailles palace, Robert-François Damiens, a forty-two year old unemployed domestic servant, rushed toward the king and lightly stabbed him with a knife. The wound was minor and Damiens made no attempt to escape. He stood there babbling something and he was quickly arrested.
After his arrest, Damiens, by all accounts quite mad, was tried and condemned as a regicide (though an unsuccessful regicide), and sentenced by the French parliament (a majority!) to be "taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds, and then in the said cart to the Palace de Grève, where on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand holding the knife with which he committed the said regicide burned with sulfur, and on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulfur melted together, and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses, and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds."
All of this was done, an elaborate spectacle of death in public. His insanity did not save Damiens. After his legs and arms had been pulled away by the horses, Damiens was apparently still alive and moving his mouth as his trunk was thrown on the fire.
We need to remember that in Europe this was the age of Voltaire, Diderot, Mozart, Handel, and other talents of the Enlightenment, the so-called century of rational thought.
The execution of Damiens was publicly witnessed by rich and poor, royalty and commoners. The event took four hours and was given extensive reportage in all the capitals of Europe. The memoirist Giacomo Casanova was at the scene, wrote that he had to turn his face away and cover his ears against the shrieks of the victim, although he did see members of the Royal Court who "did not budge an inch." Everywhere in Europe, Damiens was labeled "a lunatic" -- but nowhere was the manner of his death lamented, at least not in public. A pamphlet published in England soon afterward said of Damiens' lunacy: "Of all sorts of madness, this appears to be the worst."
No. Of all sorts of madness, tyranny is definitely the worst -- and of all forms of tyranny, tyranny of the majority is definitely the most dangerous.
Justice Antonin Scalia has it wrong, definitely wrong, and his words are an embarrassment.
Note added 1/7/11: Does Justice Scalia understand what he advocates? If the Constitution must be interpreted in terms of the intent of the framers in their historical context, the Constitution is inevitably doomed to be irrelevant in time. The reason is simple: our society changes rapidly from one generation to the next due to technology and cultural evolution, making the "intent" of the framers more and more irrelevant with each passing generation. Scalia's approach to the Constitution ultimately results in a dead Constitution, with all power in the legislatures--and a consequent tyranny of the majority. To protect us against tyranny, the Constitution must be reinterpreted by each generation in the context of current technology and culture. Our current lives cannot be held hostage to the ideas of people who lived centuries ago in a different world. The issue is the conflict between Fundamentalism and Progressive Modernism.
Part of the above essay is adapted from the book Autism: Aspects of a Medical Riddle, by Dan Agin, 2011.
Ok lets all get in a big multicultural all inclusive tribal circle around a magic tree, join hands and hum, and let the wisdom of the earth mother emanate as we sway back and forth. Later on you are going to have a choice between engaging in human sacrifice, cannibalism, or drinking the special kool-aid that allows you to visit the earth mother in person! Ok Johnny, go preach the evils of vaccination, I’m going to go worship a pig-skull.
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1097/article_detail.asp
Relax: even if America is Rome, don't forget it took a thousand years to collapse. I don't think Americans are that dumb to watch their country crumble over that long a period of time.
Our consumption driven society mistakes advertising for rational thinking. We are programmed to react emotionally to certain stimuli, which the right has mastered. Their propaganda apparatus is marvelously successful. Americans routinely vote against their own interests. For example, under eight years of Bush we had a stagnant economy, doubled the federal debt, engaged in two dubious (unfunded) wars, and deregulated ourselves into a near reprise of the Great Depression. When Obama didn't fix all that in two years, the voters put the Republicans back in control of the House and would have handed them the Senate were it not for three insane Tea Bagger candidates stinking up the ballot in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada.
You may ask, "Why is this happening?" Simple. The agenda of the plutocracy (W's base) has been to undo the progressive reforms of the 20th century. No income tax. No New Deal. No Great Society. In place they want a corporate oligarchy that turns this country into a banana republic that they may pillage at will. The Gilded Age is upon us once again.
That is so elementary, that you don't suppose it needs to be mentioned and least of all to a judge.
To think otherwise means that you believe that the government can determine better than ones employer how much an employee is worth. If they can determine that can they determine how many days off they can have, how much time they can spend in the bathroom, I mean how much do we think that government can micro manage people's lives? So saying that the Constitution doesn't allow or disallow discrimination goes under the broad view that it was largely a limiting document on what the government couldn't do. To act like that belief means that people think that women can or should be mistreated is just intellectually dishonest.
Tyranny happens when people lose control of their government, when they allow government to dictate to them without responsibility or accountability. Our government is not at all interested in dictating how much time we spend in the bathroom. In fact, our government is becoming steadily less an less interested in us and more and more invested in our corporations, which would be fine were it not for the fact that the median income is falling far below the average income.
In other words, our economy is failing us, and people like Scalia are ideologically oblivious to it. He wields the constitution against our communal interests, citing precedence and original intent when it suits him, ignoring it when it doesn't. That is tyranny, pure and simple.