Senator John McCain, who should know better, recommended cessation of aid to Egypt, stating, “We cannot stand by without acting in cases where freely elected governments are unseated by the military arm of those nations.” The confusion has to do with what a democracy is. A democracy, to whom the United States should pledge allegiance, assistance, and fraternity, is not about freely elected governments. It is about protection of minorities. Any system of government will become totalitarian if minority views are not protected. The firmest protection of those views can be found in our First Amendment: religious freedom, free speech, free press, the right to assemble, and the right to complain.
No government, elected or appointed, without these elements, can escape tyranny. Indeed, Madison and Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, teach us that a government in which the executive, judicial, and legislative functions are seated in the same group of people is the very definition of tyranny. What they mean is that a government that doesn’t have to answer to its minority views inevitably tramples those views and the persons who hold them.
Governments that embrace a particular religion must be right and dissenters must be wrong. If religion means anything, it means that. That is why I have called John 3:16 the most despicable verse in the Bible, because it says that belief (rather than good behavior) leads to salvation, and therefore it demonizes critical thinking, humor, and protest, the hallmarks of social justice. It’s the nature of religion that it cannot produce a constitution that protects minorities, because religion equates protection of minority viewpoints with deviltry. Only the separation of church and state, the foundational idea of our way of life, can lead to democracy. (It doesn’t automatically produce democracy of course, as any slave would testify; it is a necessary but not sufficient condition.)
This is why the philosophical basis of our democracy, set forth in the Declaration of Independence, emphasizes the proper role of government and its source of power. The role of government is not to control the people but to secure their rights. Government’s just source of power is not God but the consent of the governed.
Parent worship also produces totalitarianism within the individual. Psychotherapy can be viewed as a way of bringing First Amendment rights to the minority and marginalized voices within the person, so the patient can stop squelching herself.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 