About a week or so before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I was in two concurrent conversations: one with a member of Pinnacle about how we are or are not responding to questions of race and equity, and the other with one of my own children about what makes for democracy.  In the first, we were wrestling with the right balance between learning and action.  In the latter, we were talking about the relationship between the values of democracy and the processes of democracy.  The first one went to how hard it is to strike the right balance.  The second one went to my belief that democratic vision is not, at its essence, about majority rule.  Recently assertions from Washington that "We won, therefore we have the obligation to use power in any way we see fit," does not reflect democracy.  In fact, as far as I can tell it's anti-democratic, and anti-liberty—at least in the way our founders imagined liberty.  For contrary to what I was taught in elementary school, democracy is not majority rule.  Democracy is, in fact, and by definition, a set of systems designed to protect the minority.  Democracy is rules by which dissent is incorporated into decision-making.  It is a collection of norms for civic life and civil discourse by which a society welcomes reasoned disagreement.  That is democracy.  Majority governance is part of a democracy, but it is not its essence.  Majority rule is not even a part.  Majority rule is democracy's enemy.  

So with my first interlocutor, I remembered a line I learned in high school from someone I knew nothing about, Learned Hand.  And so I went searching.  I found the quote, and the 1944 speech from which it came.  In that short speech from this famous jurist, who I learn has been quoted as much or more in judicial cases than any American jurist, I hear a vision for democracy similar to what my son and I were talking about.  So I gave him a copy of Learned Hand's speech.  And I read it a few times myself.

Then, learning more about the remarkable life of Justice Ginsburg this week, I realize that this little speech by Learned Hand has a remarkable resonance with her life.  And so in this moment in our nation, I want to offer you this little speech by Judge Learned Hand.  It's from a gathering on "I Am an American Day" in 1944, in the midst of war.  I'd also say that it was this vision of democracy that laid a foundation for civil rights yet to come.  

You'll notice his reference to Biblical faith.

“The Spirit of Liberty.”
A speech given by Judge Learned Hand in 1944 in celebration of I Am an American Day.

We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedoms from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning. What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men [persons] recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me [and] pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.