Robert Bork's View of Democracy

The premise of Robert Bork's article "Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Can Democratic Government Survive?" is that democracy as currently practiced by the United States is indeed not a democracy at all. Rather, due to the proliferation of alternative and minority viewpoints, and the transformation of judge-made law to address these viewpoints, the democracy has in fact become ruled by the will of the minority. Bork states that modern liberalism is "fundamentally at odds with democratic government because it demands results that ordinary people would not freely choose" (Bork 46). What he is saying, in essence, is that because liberals choose to give voice to the viewpoints of groups that do not themselves make up the majority, they have removed the rule of the majority from our nominally democratic form of government.

The particular institution Bork targets for the codification and legalization of these viewpoints is the Supreme Court. He quotes Abraham Lincoln to establish his point: "`The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal'" (Bork 46). Interestingly enough, however, Bork seems to target only specific decisions of the Supreme Court. For example, he chooses to

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ly viable again. The current administration and the changing demographics of the United States almost guarantee that his position will remain politically unpopular. His theory also begs the question of whether the Constitution should continue to be read literally in a country that has witnessed as many changes as has the United States. Part II It is, undoubtedly, hard to predict what American society would be like in the year 2101. However, the last century or so has witnessed enormous civil rights struggles in America by groups of people who were never intended protection by the original drafters of the Constitution. These struggles continue to be fought by the minority groups who were blatantly excluded despite their presence in the country during the drafting of the Constitution, as well as by new immigrant groups who find themselves excluded from political consideration. There is no reason to believe that these groups will abandon this fight over the next hundred years. Robert Bork's reliance on a literal reading of the Constitution to support his argument that European Christendom is threatened will likely still continue to be sounded in the year 2101. Bork's argument seems to assume that the positions taken by min

Category: Government - R