Three Sides of Democracy

            At a GOP debate last Thursday, Ron Paul defended his position that drugs should be decriminalized. “We don’t have the first amendment so that we can talk about the weather,” explained the Congressman before a South Carolina audience. “You have the right to do things that are very controversial.” In Paul’s reading of the Bill of Rights, citizens are empowered to make their own decisions. Government should not tell its citizens what they can or cannot consume.

            Seeing an opportunity to skewer his rival, another candidate rushed to condemn him. “You want to legalize heroin?” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. Paul shrewdly deflected the attack. He turned to the audience and asked, “How many people here would use heroin if it were legal?” The audience applauded. “Oh yeah,” said Paul confidently, “I need government to take care of me. I don’t want to use heroin so I need these laws.” Once again, Paul had proven that real individuals don’t need government.

            Yet there is nothing like springtime on a college campus to make one wonder exactly what to do about the use of drugs and alcohol. “We have the right to do some things that are controversial,” says this new generation of libertarians. “The state can’t tell me how much alcohol I can consume.” Were Ron Paul to pose his rhetorical question to these springtime revelers, most of them would probably say, “Hell, no! I don’t need laws to stop me from shooting up.” But were he to ask them if they needed laws not to drink a six-pack in an hour while on anti-depression medication, I’m not sure what they would say.  In the moment of revelry, they surely would applaud and cheer on the libertarian candidate. But what would they say on the ride back from the Emergency Room?

            College students are among Ron Paul’s greatest supporters, and not just because he points out the contradictions and inefficiencies of the state’s drug and alcohol laws. Ron Paul also romanticizes their drunk-and-disorderliness with first amendment freedom. In his handling, what might be a regrettable incident looks like a controversial exercise of free speech. But for those of us trying to bring this generation into adulthood, Paul’s logic doesn’t offer much leverage against destructive behavior. While it is clear that laws are not doing much to constrain underage consumption of alcohol, it is also clear that these emerging individuals aren’t always able to make good decisions for themselves.            

The problem with libertarian logic is that it forgets that people are social animals and that we need social mores, otherwise known as shared community standards, in order to survive. Social mores, as my colleague Richard Glezjer pointed out recently, are what allowed Paul to question his audience so confidently about their heroin use. He knew he could rely on them to respond in the negative. Even though he never credits community standards in his libertarian arguments, those standards gave him the winning point in that particular debate. Had he been addressing a different audience, say a group of drug users in recovery, or a neighborhood under attack by rival drug lords, he might not have done so well.

            But it’s not just libertarians who downplay the importance of social mores. In the last thirty years, progressives have decried shared community values, often with good reason. Social mores, they point out, have been an obstacle to freedom. Consider how social norms kept women in the home, gays in the closet, and Blacks in “colored only” facilities. Besides, they argue, social mores are a strategy used by social conservatives to turn the clock back to less equitable times. Moral arguments are the stuff of tyrants.

            At their most basic level, however, social mores are the expression of a community’s concern for itself. In our community, say the social mores, we don’t beat our girlfriends or steal each other’s belongings or deface public property with pictures intended to offend. We restrain those urges not because we fear the state but because we live better in a society that holds these things to be true. Of course, social mores, like laws, need to be re-evaluated from time to time. Social mores that restrict a certain group’s freedoms need to be emended just as the laws that restricted that minority’s actions were emended. But emendation doesn’t mean erasure. Without social mores, communities lose standing in the discussion of what sort of world we want to create for ourselves.

When colleges, for instance, only talk about drinking in terms of individual rights and state law, other affected parties don’t get to participate in the conversation. Students who might want a quieter campus to prepare for finals, teachers who might want to work with students who don’t have a hangover, maintenance workers who might want to come in on Monday morning and not pick up beer bottles, don’t have a voice in the tired and tiresome battle between the rights-bearing individual and the punitive state. Without social mores, we are forced to solve our disputes by either calling the police or transferring out at the next opportunity. With social mores, we dare tell the revelers how their behavior affected us, not because we want to see them punished, but because we want to improve our chances of flourishing.

            My problem with Ron Paul’s argument is not his stance on drug laws: I agree that they are ineffective. My disagreement lies in the libertarian assumption that there are only two sides to the story of American democracy, the individual and the state. Tocqueville suggested almost two hundred years ago that the problems of democracy in the United States would be mediated by the social mores established in New England town meetings and through the moral leadership of women. Without those mediating influences, he feared that America would devolve into a tyranny of the majority with no concern for quieter points of view. We may be proving him right.