IMPEACHMENT AND DEMOCRACY

There are righteous claims that surround the impeachment of President Trump, claims about the proper process, the gravity of the offenses, the appropriate legal analogies to criminal trials, and who one should believe about what. Let us put those weighty matters aside and examine a different debate, the one as to whether democracy should be trumped by a vague and murky process of legislators seemingly concerned with illegality. How are we to weigh those concerns – the will of the people (or at least those people in the electoral college) and the disqualifying claims of a successful investigative process – and decide whether a president faced with a renewed look by voters just months before the next election should have his term truncated? That is, how concerned should we be about interfering with democracy?

I want to suggest the answer is not much, for several quite different reasons. To understand why is first to ask why we should care so much about having a democracy: a form of government that counts equally the votes of the ignorant, the hateful, the biased and the mentally challenged with the votes of the competent, the informed, and the unbiased. Moreover, the will of the majority is no guarantee of the rights of the minority, often just the opposite: Hitler was elected Chancellor in Weimer Germany and at least a dozen Presidents and hundreds of elected Congressmen were, to say the least, indifferent to African-American slaves and Native Americans. Why bemoan intrusions to it?

There are, briefly, two kinds of claims in democracy’s favor: an empirical (the best of the bad) and a moral one. Even if the empirical leads to a different conclusion (we could do better, for the sake of argument, by electors constituting an elite chosen for their judgment, fairness, knowledge and incorruptibility, a tall order), the moral argument would remain compelling. It basically is this: we only treat our fellow humans as fully human – with all their human weaknesses and failings – if we accord them the autonomy and dignity of full humanity by leaving the choice to choose their own destiny. That choice may be unwise or imprudent, but we unpatronizingly allow it to be theirs. Essential to how we treat others, the test of any system of ethics, is our willingness to both respect them (dignity) and leave them alone (autonomy). Hence, democracy.

What, then, as to what seems to be interference: impeachment? In theory, it can correct mistakes in voters’ knowledge and judgment, either as mistakes foreseen but ignored or unforeseen but sinister nonetheless. Democracy may not always guarantee the civil rights of the minority, but neither does impeachment (although those trying to remove Andrew Johnson had a pretty good argument that his removal would have improved the liberties of freed slaves). What about the argument from morality: impeachment undermines the autonomous choices of individuals, so it cannot be a good thing. It is certainly a cautionary tale, but is it successful? I suggest it is not, if either of two pillars of morality are endangered. These are the opportunity for future democracy and the centrality of the value of truth. Both, unfortunately, are at issue with this President.