We are teaching contempt for the courtroom and the ballot and the free page — and calling it conscience.

During the past few weeks, I have found myself reading article after article, watching the election returns come in from New York, listening to friends — Jewish and gentile alike — and feeling something I have not felt before. I have spent much of my adult life believing that democracies eventually correct themselves. Lately I have become less certain.

Had you asked me ten years ago whether I would ever write an essay like this one, I suspect I would have laughed. I have not arrived at these thoughts eagerly. Quite the opposite.

So what frightens me is not because I believe every critic of Israel is an antisemite; I don’t. It is not because I imagine democracies are incapable of monstrous things; they are entirely capable.

All of this sent me back in time, to a day I have never quite forgotten. On May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd of American students at Kent State University, and four of them died. It remains one of the darkest days in modern American memory.

But Kent State is not evidence that democracy failed. It is evidence of what democracy is. The shootings became a national scandal precisely because Americans were free to investigate them, to denounce them, to write the books and make the films, to sue their own government, to hold hearings, to sing the song the whole country sang, and to teach their children what had happened on that lawn. More than fifty years later, we still know the name. That is not an accident. It is what a free society does with its own sins: it drags them into the light.

The question has never been whether democracies commit terrible wrongs. The question is what is allowed to happen next — that is where the moral........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)