The origins of totalitarian democracy

The blog, A Saintly Salmagundi's recent juxtaposition of a CNS news services photograph of last weekend's pro-abortion ralley in Washington, DC, with a photograph of a Nazi rally in WWII Germany (click beneath the picture of the DC rally, where it says: Have you seen something like this before?) in a recent post, provoked me to write a piece which I mailed to "Catholics for Free Choice." Thanks for the inspiration Salmagundi!

J.L. Talmon, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, once wrote a book entitled THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIAN DEMOCRACY. It was a study of J.J. Rousseau's SOCIAL CONTRACT, among other things. But a salient point made by Talmon is that much that passes for freedom of thought, democracy, and toleration today is deeply imbued with presuppositions of totalitarianism. In fact, nothing is so utterly repressive and destructive of freedom and toleration than the extension of toleration to the very framework of values that furnishes the foundation for freedom and toleration itself. In fact, Michael Polanyi (in his book, Meaning) makes a similar point when he addresses the point where "the inconsistency of liberalism based on philosophic doubt" becomes apparent:

Freedom of thought is destroyed by the extension of doubt to the field of traditional ideas, which includes the basis for freedom of thought.

This is what happens when Catholics extend their personal preferences for free choice to include matters over which the Catholic Church has clearly declared that it has no authority to change its position-- such as abortion. The Catholic Church claims less authority than any other Christian church in the world; that is why it is so conservative. Mainline Protestant churches often feel free to change "the deposit of faith" by going along with whatever happens to be the majority opinion of the times. This is why G.K. Chesterton could declare: "the Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his own age." J.J. Rousseau, of course, that champion of French egalitarianism and freedom who became, in effect, the antecedent spokesman for the yet future French Revolution, was so tolerant as to declare of those who could not give their assent to the majority opinion in a democracy: "They must be COMPELLED to be free." Which gives new and poignant meaning to the term "freedom." When does "free choice" become a choice for a "freedom" that undermines the freedom of many others and becomes a repressive regime of tyranny?