CHARLEMONT — Amherst College Professor Austin Sarat’s message was clear: “I’m worried” about the future of democracy.
But in a nearly two-hour Charlemont Forum talk that packed Charlemont Federated Church, the expert in jurisprudence and political science made clear that “My concerns about democracy don’t have to do with the current president. … The problem isn’t Trump. … I could never have conceived of the need for talking to American audiences about democracy and the rule of law.”
He told Tuesday night’s gathering that he’s truly concerned about increased political apathy, increased inequality, the rise of political polarization and the reality that in the age after World War II fascism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, democracy and the rule of law in the United States have become a political truism — “a belief that is so self-evident to us that we don’t think it needs defense.”
“People who grew up in the ‘30s and ‘40s, they understood what was at stake,” he said, reflecting on one of several Pew Research Center and Gallup surveys showing that more young people are “politically disengaged” — with fewer people registering to vote or voting.
“Many people in the United States think the political system has failed,” said Sarat. “They don’t trust the political system, and we’re suffering from political paralysis. For democracy to survive, for the rule of law to survive, people have to believe that there are certain things that are more important than winning.”
Challenging the notion that the Constitution in itself is a bedrock of democracy, Sarat pointed out that U.S. democracy has developed over time through constitutional amendments that have defined equal protection under law, abolished slavery, provided for direct election of the Senate and extended the right to vote regardless of race or gender.
Sarat, who quizzed audience members about their familiarity with the U.S. Constitution — and found few who could identify the amendments or had read it in its entirety — quoted President John Adams’ observation that “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
He also quoted President James Madison, writing in The Federalist Papers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
Yet Sarat also presented the results of polling in February showing that more than half of Trump voters believe that the president should be able to overturn decisions by judges that he disagrees with. “The rule of law commits the rulemakers to follow the rules,” said Sarat, who questioned whether the fact that democracy derives from consent of the governed is necessarily preferable to “consent of those who know, or care.”
Sarat said his cause is civic education, adding, “The problem can only be addressed if we agree we have a problem … And the problem … is us. Trump is the symptom… I think the foundation is being eroded, and that foundation is belief in democracy and the rule of law.
When one woman raised a question about voters who were “not thinking” last November, Sarat responded sharply, “I think we have to be careful not to label those with whom we disagree, as uninformed, unintelligent or people of ill will.”
Responding to another woman, who said democratic town meetings give New Englanders an important opportunity to deliberate and come to consensus, he said, “What I worry about … is that we’re in enclaves of isolation. We hang out with people who share our attitudes. Right now, we’re much more in a hunker-down mode than a learning mode.”
In a related way, he said, “the party system in the United States is kind of chaos in paralysis,” in which compromise comes at a political cost.
And the perception that big money is controlling the political system, which two audience members pointed to, is one that Sarat believes is not going to galvanize enough people to find a solution.
Still, he said, “Maybe now, in the year of Trump … which feels to me like an era when authoritarianism is on the horizon, in which the rule of law is threatened, in which a commission is put together to examine a non-problem called voting fraud … the good news is that those headlines begin to get people’s attention.”
Sarat said, “We haven’t had a conversation about why democracy is important, because we’ve just taken it for granted.”
Quoting from former President Barack Obama’s January farewell address, he said, “If there’s any good news, given the dark clouds on the horizon, maybe now people are awakened to the idea that Obama was right. That if we want to preserve democracy and the rule of law, we need ‘to be jealous guardians of democracy.’”
You can reach Richie Davis at
rdavis@recorder.com
or 413-772-0261, ext. 269