Published in Liberty Free Press, June 17, 2000
“In a democracy, we can have disagreements,” said Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion, “but we ought to avoid personal attacks.” Like so much political rhetoric, this statement is totally out of touch with the real world, and relates to a minor quarrel between two politicos, Lucien Bouchard and Jean Chrétien. In the meantime, crucial issues are shaping the kind of society in which our children will live.
However irrelevant the statement is, its first part – “ In a democracy, we can have disagreements” – strikes at the hearth of those crucial issues. For it needs a qualification: in a democracy, we can have disagreements, but only up to a point. We have to agree on some fundamental values; indeed, we send to jail those who don’t. At the same time, though, we have to minimize the reasons for jailing people who disagree with us.
Political disagreements are not like disagreements of consumers in the marketplace. Minority consumers may choose a make of car, a brand of beer or a kind of book, even if others (perhaps the majority) prefer something else. In political decisions, the winner takes all: when a law is voted, everybody has to buy it, whether one wants it or not. For a very simple reason: the winning party stands ready to send its armed men to bring the minority in line. Indeed, this is why cops carry guns, not books of exhortations. (This is also why, in modern, civilized nations, ordinary people used to have the right to own and carry guns, until far into the 20th century.)
A few important points must be noted about the core values on which agreement is required. First, in order to maximize consent, these values must be obvious and small in number – like non-violence and peaceful resolution of interindividual conflicts, whenever possible.
A second, related point: agreement on fundamental values does not necessarily mean agreement to impose some people’s values on others. The discovery of Western liberalism is that agreement often means agreeing to disagree. This is how we solve disagreements on many issues that are thought to be fundamental by many people. We agree that disagreement is possible on education of children, love, sex, religion, the meaning of life and the universe, and so forth.
Another crucial point: Disagreement does not only mean expressing different opinions, but also, and more importantly, living (peacefully) according to one’s opinions. Liberty is more about a diversity of lifestyles than a cacophony of voices. And when a minority, or a majority, is intent on imposing a particular lifestyle by force on a minority, society may be near the breaking point.
A case in point is the June 15 Supreme Court judgment on the Firearms Act. Granted that that the Court was not asked to rule on the legitimacy of the most recent firearm controls, but only on power sharing between the federal and provincial governments. Actually, the Supreme Court could not be asked to rule on much else. In our system, Parliament, that is the party in power, that is the Prime Minister, is a king who shares sovereign power with a tentacular bureaucracy. Our constitution (so-called) protect little else than collective “rights” of politically correct groups. Yet, the Court has confirmed that the so-called Firearms Act is the law of the land.
Consider what disagreement means in this case. It means that the State, whether it represents 49%, or 51% or 80% of voters (and whether these voters have read or not the 1977 C-51 Act, the 1991 C-17 Act, the 1996 C-68 Act, and the accompanying regulations), will criminalize hundreds of thousands of Canadians who own a firearm without having obtained the complicated and intrusive licenses now required. It means that the State will send its armed men to enforce these laws on peaceful individuals who are exercising a right hard-earned by their English (or French) forebears.
This may very well be the kind of deep disagreement to which no democratic society can survive. There are two ways out. Either the disagreement is abolished, i.e., the minority is coercively brought into line, and we have a totalitarian democracy. Or the disagreement is allowed to persist, which requires that the State abandon, or be forced to abandon, its totalitarian pretensions. I believe we are entering crucial years where this alternative will be decided for many decades, perhaps centuries, to come.