Reflections on Democracy

For many people throughout the world, the idea of “Israeli Democracy” is an oxymoron.  But this past week, Israel did something suggestive of a very healthy democracy – its Attorney General, Avichai Mandelblit, who is ideologically compatible with its Prime Minister, publicly recommended only weeks before the upcoming elections that Prime Minister Netanyahu be indicted.  No indictment will be filed until after Netanyahu is given an opportunity to state his case before Mandelblit.  But ultimately, Mandelblit will be the one to make the decision, and we know where he stands at present.

This is not the first time a sitting Israeli Prime Minister has been the subject of a legal scandal.  It was just such a scandal that brought down the Administration of Ehud Olmert, who served as Prime Minister in 2008.  Notably, Olmert ended up serving 16 months in prison for his criminal activity.  Clearly, Israel is a country that takes very seriously the principle that every individual, even the heads of state, are accountable to the public and to the rule of law.

Mandelblit’s announcement this week made me think about the essence of democracy and how it can be evaluated in so many different ways.   In some respects, Israel looms large as a democracy; in others, it falls far short.  This past July, for example, Israel enacted its “Nation-State” law, which cemented some very profound ways in which Israel extends preferences to Jews over gentiles.  The United States, my own country, has a very proud and comparatively ancient tradition of democracy, and yet this tradition is not without gaping holes.  On the very same day that Mandelblit was recommending the indictment of his nation’s leader, I was touring the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture.  Needless to say, I got more than a whiff of the way the leaders of my own country, while waxing eloquent about their devotion to democracy, hypocritically treated one race of people as truly sub-human – an affront that makes the worst of Israel’s abuses look benign by comparison.

As an American, when I think about the moments in which I was proudest of our own democracy, my attention inevitably turns back to the summer of 1974.  I was a rising 10^th grader and deeply riveted by the hearings of the House Judiciary Committee and its consideration of whether to recommend the impeachment of President Nixon.  When I look back on Elizabeth Holtzman, Peter Rodino, Father Robert Drinan, Paul Sarbanes, John Conyers and Charlie Rangel – they were truly heroes to me.  That’s because they were all Democrats, that was my party, and they were leading the prosecution of a corrupt President.  But now that I’ve aged a bit, I realize that the true heroes weren’t so much the Committee’s 21 Democrats but its 17 Republicans, who opened their hearts and minds to the facts of the case and ultimately voted – unanimously – to submit three articles of impeachment to the full house against their party’s leader and the nation’s President.  Those Republicans put country before party -- just like Mandelblit did this past Thursday in his own country. 

At some point in my life, I came to conclude that you can largely judge the health of a democracy by how willing its citizens are to buck their party’s leaders when the circumstances so warrant.   To me, that is just another way of asking whether we view ourselves as Democrats and Republicans first and foremost, or whether we see ourselves as Americans.  Sometimes it is critically important to be loyal to your party; I get that.  If one party is playing rough, then perhaps the other needs to do the same just to maintain some semblance of equity.  But that principle is hardly relevant to the situation that the House Judiciary Committee faced in 1974, or to the situation Mandelblit faced this past week.  They saw abuses being perpetrated by their party’s leaders, and they could either bury their heads in the sand or honor their oaths of office.  Thankfully, they chose the latter path.

Near the end of the Clinton Administration, I remember another scandal consuming my country, and this time it was associated with the leader of my own party, President Clinton.  Looking back at the so-called “Monica Lewinsky Scandal,” the facts about the President’s behavior were hardly in dispute.  The only question was what to make of them.  On the Democratic side, everyone acknowledged that the President’s conduct was inappropriate.  Yet with few exceptions, they seemed willing to condone it – or at least they appeared that way to me.  For the first (and last) time in my life, I found myself watching Fox News more often than the other Cable News networks because I agreed more with what the Republicans were saying about the scandal than the Democrats.  No, I didn’t support impeachment, but I had hoped the President would resign and was rather appalled by the way Democrats trivialized the significance of his misconduct.   I felt, in short, like the Democrats had failed the test passed in 1974 by the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee or last week by Attorney General Mandelblit. 

In early-March 1999, I gave a speech to a few dozen people that discussed precisely why I felt that the President’s behavior was so profoundly disturbing under the circumstances.  You can find a transcript of the relevant comments at the following link, beginning on page 9:  http://www.danielspiro.com/uploads/3/1/0/2/31022605/purim99.pdf

Was I right in being so tough on President Clinton?  Should I have taken a more laissez-faire attitude about his sex life?  In hindsight, I would agree that reasonable people can be found on both sides of this issue.  But what’s important is not so much that Mandelblit interpreted the law correctly in recommending indictment, or that the Republicans who favored the impeachment of Nixon were right in their legal analysis, or that I was right in hoping Clinton would resign in 1999 -- what’s important is that when it comes to evaluating the conduct of our own leaders, we put party aside and country first, or at least we try to do so.

A lot had changed from 1974 to 1999 in America.  This country became far more polarized during that quarter century.  In the twenty years since, its polarization has become even worse.   So, I ask you: how strong is our democracy?  Are we an exemplar of a mature republic, with a sufficiently free and healthy public sphere as to give rise to human passions and the political factions that inevitably result from them?  Or are have we instead morphed into two ideologically incompatible peoples sharing the same land and fighting our wars in the ballot box every two years, with the spoils going to whoever happens to win the most recent election?  Maybe that is the situation at present, but it doesn’t have to describe our future.  I look forward to the day where both parties will have plenty of free-thinking mavericks who follow the truth wherever it leads and aren’t afraid of taking on the leaders of their party, whether they are in the White House, the People’s House, or on the God-damned radio.