Wish I'd said that ...

{link » Liberty and Justice for All?}

From a review ©2007, by Bruce Thornton, of Michael Mandelbaum’s Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government:

Democracy’s Good Name makes a powerful argument for the continuation of the spread of democracy. My only criticism focuses on the scant attention Mandelbaum pays to the deleterious effects of some ideals that tend to develop in democracies and weaken them from within. For example, Mandelbaum notes that the idea of political equality reflects “an unprecedented and remarkably broad consensus,” one beyond discussion and defense in democratic societies. But as Plato and Aristotle both understood, political equality can degenerate into a radical egalitarianism, the notion, as Aristotle put it, “that those equal in any respect are equal in all respects.” In the Western democracies, we can see the impact of radical egalitarianism in many government policies, which use the coercive power of the state to impose equality of results rather than just guaranteeing equality of opportunity. This egalitarianism thus maximizes the power of the state in ways detrimental both to a free-market economy and democratic freedom itself.

Second, the tendency of political liberty to degenerate into license is another danger of democracies also visible everywhere in our own society. Most people think that enjoying political liberty means doing what they want. This profound misunderstanding of what, from Plato to the Founders, was called ordered liberty has promoted the multiplication of “civil liberties” to include activities like pornography that would have horrified the Founders. License disguised as political freedom pollutes the public square and compromises the very virtues — self-control and personal responsibility, for example — without which political liberty cannot survive. [emphasis added]

I like how this man thinks and expresses himself.

Thornton'08 (if not sooner)