William Gairdner offers a sobering diagnosis
of our dangerously corrupt political culture

The Trouble with Democracy: A Citizen Speaks Out by William Gairdner (Stoddart, $50, 534 pages)William Gairdner, author of The Trouble with Canada and The War Against the Family, now takes aim at the problems with democracy in The Trouble with Democracy: A Citizen Speaks Out.

According to Gairdner, Canada and most western “democracies” are “sham democracies,” the real thing long ago replaced by “hyperdemocracy.” The consequences are serious, notably the rise of moral relativism, a loss of liberty and an out-of-control state that is both costly and overbearing. And this change in our conception of democracy goes a long way to explaining why abortion is considered a vital right and our civic institutions continually assault the foundation of our society, the family.

Gairdner says that “The language and concepts derived from a new kind of democratic thinking are corroding our most cherished ideals.” This new kind of democratic thinking – the “equalization of rights” – is animated by the displacement of negative rights (rights that protect citizens from the power of the state such as freedom of the press and freedom of religion) by the notion of positive rights (an action by the government that benefits a citizen or group of citizens such as welfare, public education, bilingualism, taxpayer funded abortion). That is, no longer are rights understood as freedom from coercion but as government actions to ensure some equality of result for as many citizens as possible.

Aside from the creation of the caretaker state, modern democratic thinking leads to a views of rights as doing what one wants without limits. Freedom without limits is the central problem of our hyperdemocracy and the moral relativism it engenders. Now, freedom means only caring about yourself.

Gairdner laments this change in the democratic ideal and details its decline. Formerly, democratic language assumed a shared religious and moral heritage, an understanding of right and wrong, but that is no longer true. Gairdner traces the abandonment of our religious, legal and political traditions and finds that Judeo-Christian principles and the idea of enduring moral truths are no longer upheld, replaced by a relativistic approach to morality. Liberal elites have abandoned the moral truths western civilization has long accepted, in favour of godless gnosticism which puts its faith in the autonomy of individuals and man’s (supposed) perfectibility and the necessity of courts and commissions to be arbitrators of rights.

We now have a society which assumes that citizens have all the rights, while the states have all the duties, resulting in what Gairdner calls “libertarian socialism,” something most people will consider something of an oxymoron. Under hyperdemocracy, the duty of the state to provide for everyone’s needs and wants and provide not just a level playing field, but to referee the game, enforce the rules and if necessary change the rules along the way. (This is what the Vriend and M. v. H. decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada are all about.)

There is a resulting imbalance between society and the individual, because the sovereign self has been made into a god. We want to live without any limits. Thus, there are demands for the right to live without work, the right not to be offended, the right to kill the unborn child, the right to have every sexual proclivity receive the official stamp of approval.

Gairdner criticizes the idea that the state is or can ever be neutral on moral issues. There is hardly neutrality when the state supports the tax-funded killing in the womb of one-quarter of its own unborn citizens as a democratic freedom. But by turning a blind eye to the carnage of abortion, the state has “clearly set itself up as a moral dictator and arbiter of the value of human life.”

But there is an even bigger problem when it comes to abortion. Gairdner says abortion is seen as necessary “in order to sustain … ideological purity.” Abortion is about more than mere lifestyle convenience; it is that our warped egalitarianism requires any distinctions between male and female to be obliterated. Furthermore, the recognition of the rights of the child in the womb “creates an immediate unwilled obligation” which “constrains” freedom.

Modern democracy places its “feverish, near-theological defense of egalitarian democratic ideology against the counterclaims of human biology.” Rights which provide official sanction for any sexual coupling, abortion or the easy disintegration of marriage are all part of modern man’s refusal to subordinate “the personal will” to “the natural order of humanity and its moral authority.”

While Gairdner exposes the disparity between the “idea and the reality of democracy” and explains the ideological underpinnings of the de-moralization of society, he does not provide much in the way of solutions on how to restore genuine democracy and, more importantly, a respect for and voluntary submission to moral authority that limits our freedom.