lato held that Democracy is very problematic.  Indeed, he deemed it to be a political arrangement that would be full of corruption.  For precisely this reason he favored the Philosopher King.  There is perhaps nothing more astounding—there can be no more sobering thought—than the fact that American Democracy would seem to prove that Plato was right on target about the corrosive character of Democracy.  The Platonic critique of American society is sublime in virtue of its simplicity.

The most fundamental and basic moorings of a just society is not liberty, but an abiding sense of right and wrong.  Liberty, of course, is important.  However, liberty that is not inexorably animated by a sense of right and wrong will be utterly calamitous.  It is this profoundly simple truth that no longer animates American Democracy, namely the truth that liberty is subordinate to right and wrong. 

Increasingly, everyone is interested in none other than maximizing her or his liberties; and people will say whatever it takes and people will do whatever it takes to achieve that end.  Increasingly people, are no more animated by the desire to do what is right, than they are animated by the desire to quack like a duck.  Painfully, it might be easier to get a crowd of people to quack like a duck than to do something decent.

Thus, it is more of an accident nowadays that something right gets done than it is the deliberate intentions of individuals to do what is right.  And this holds with respect to just about every social endeavor in which human beings engaged, from finances to gender and racial equality to the commitment to child care. 

The best way to see this is to observe that if a sense of right and wrong has pride of place in society, then it is also the case that a sense of responsibility also has pride of place in society.  What has come to be definitive of American Democracy is that everyone wants liberty, but no one wants to accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong. 

So when people take out loans for houses that they obviously cannot afford, they blame someone else.  To be sure, I understand that all sorts of people were lying about things.  This, though, does not undercut the point. 

Suppose I tell you that I have milk that never goes sour, no matter how long it has been kept unrefrigerated.  If you believe me and then buy some of the milk, do you not bear some responsibility for believing what is plainly absurd?  It is true that I lied.  But what the hell were you doing in believing me?  You were acting like a fool.  One does not need so much as a high school diploma to know that milk is the sort of thing that will go sour.  Why, if enough time has passed, milk will go sour even if it has been kept in the refrigerator.  And this much knowledge comes from the deliverances of ordinary experiences. 

The point here is that it is simply false that I have been deceived every time I act on a lie that has been told to me.  This is because in a great many cases the deliverances of commonsense make it manifestly clear that I am being told a lie.  I do not need to be a math major to know that I cannot afford a $300,000 home if I earn only $50,000 a year. 

We see the refusal to accept responsibility in the matter of race as well.  Thus, black-on-black crime is attributed to racism.  Black-on-black crime is committed against black people by black people who exclaim at the top of their lungs that they are African-American and that they identify with and love their people.  Well, how is it even remotely plausible that racism is the explanation for why people who express these sentiments kill other black people?  How about greed and callousness as an explanation?

Or consider this.  If a person leaves her or his child in a car and the child dies because the car became too hot, then we feel sorry for the parent and deem punishing the parent inappropriate.  Yet, if a person leaves her or his dog in the car, there is moral outrage over the person’s callousness and indifference to the well-being of the dog.  A fantasy?  Not at all.  For we have the following story in the LA Times: “Man arrested after his dog, left in hot car for hours dies” 

It goes without saying that neither dog nor infant should be left in a hot car for hours.  But one would have thought that if a person can be held morally responsible for the death of her or his dog, which dies as a result of being left in a hot care for hours, then a person can be held morally responsible for the death of her or his child, who dies as a result of being left in a hot car for hours.  One would have thought that, at the very least, the life of a human being had no less value, moral or otherwise, than the life of an animal. 

This utterly incongruous moral attitude, where the death of a dog left in a car generates more concern than the death of an infant left in a car, is one of the ultimate perversions in a society in which liberty takes priority over right and wrong.   

For with the abdication of right and wrong, what matters most nowadays is simply how people feel, as if feelings in and of themselves were a moral barometer.  From one aspect of life to the next, we are concerned with none other than how people feel.  Yet, anyone who has lived a meaningful life will tell you that overcoming mere feelings at some point in time was easily one of the greatest catalysts of moral growth in her or his life.  Nay, the very idea of duty implies that there are modes of behavior expected of us, and rightly so, regardless of how we feel. 

Precisely, what we know is that feelings about the very same thing can vary from one person to the next and that over time even the same people can feel differently about the same things.  What is more, privileging feelings preclude the sort self-examination that makes moral and intellectual growth possible.  This is why, for instance, Dr. Laura Schlessinger routinely points out that she is not interested in the feelings of those who call to her program. 

Needless to say, privileging feelings about right and wrong is doomed to fail.  Democracy, Plato thought, was doomed to be corrupt for precisely that reason.  If there should be anyone who doubts the horror of placing feelings about right and wrong, I say to her or him: Behold democracy as it is now practiced in the United States.  You can be inspired by what you see only if you are morally corrupt.