On the political right, “representative democracy” means a system in which we use various representative and democratic means to set the rules by which our government will conduct itself and to elect the people charged with ensuring that those rules are followed.  Elected officials must take into account the policy preferences of the constituencies that elected them, but they also must respect the rights of those that did not.

Voters’ preferences, from one election to the next, allow for gradual change even when fickle, because the people in office must abide by rules implemented by constituencies that actively oppose them.  Among the many benefits of this gradual change is that it allows space for representative democracy to be civil.  We can still be a community, rather than a series of battling factions, because the side that wins or loses in any given election only matters so much.

On the political left — as has become increasingly clear in the Obama Era — “representative democracy” means that we have elections, and the people whom we choose to “represent” us have very wide latitude to decide what’s right and wrong.  We’re not to the point that it would be accurate to say that they can do whatever they want, but such acknowledgments must be followed by the qualifier “yet.”  In this system, every election is “must win,” because the rules are determined by the most recent victor, and they cannot be expected to protect the most recent loser.

Writing about how the president’s unilateral approval of war meshes with his unilateral action on a wide variety of issues, David Harsanyi puts it well in terms of politics in a post titled “Obama Goes Rogue“:

Of the countless lessons we’ve learned from liberals over the past few years, none is more critical than this: If Democrats find an issue important enough, and if doing something feels like the “right thing,” Barack Obama has the power to act without any regard for separation of powers. So what makes anyone believe that war would be any different?

This power is especially valuable during election season, because it means legislators don’t have to take votes that might make it more complicated for them to keep their seats, given what they’ve promised voters in the past.  In other words, they don’t actually have to represent anybody.

We’ve actually got an excellent example close to home, in Fall River and Somerset.  According to the Washington Post, Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter explicitly declined to press charges against climate change activists because he agreed with their political views.  The two men had used a lobster boat to block a shipment of coal from reaching the Brayton Point Power Station.  Sutter declared the crime to be “civil disobedience,” and therefore meriting only a civil fine to give local law enforcement compensation for their time.  (Whether that extra compensation will be forwarded to local taxpayers isn’t mentioned.)

Jeff Jacoby points out in the Boston Globe the similar actions of white Southern prosecutors who used their prosecutorial discretion to let racists get away with hate crimes.  To progressives, this isn’t a contradiction because those civil-rights-era abuses were wrong because racism is wrong, and Sutter’s abuses are not wrong, because saving the environment is not wrong.

This view tears at the very fabric that has allowed our society to be a force for good.  The thing that draws people into a representative democratic system is that they can work to implement their preferred policies, and they can adjust as things gradually change.  If government officials will not enforce laws against protests that harm other people and their businesses, then those people and their businesses have incentive to find ways to protect themselves outside of the law.

That outcome is bad for both sides, inasmuch as protestors who break the law rely implicitly on the willingness of their targets to follow the law and not, for example, simply plow through their much-smaller boats.

It’s also bad for society more generally.  Winner-take-all politics will destroy a community, making it impossible for consensus to form and leaving the community unprepared for threats and challenges.  How likely are people to bring their good ideas and efforts to area if they risk discovering that they’re on the side that has no rights?

Look across the water from Somerset, in Rhode Island, for the answer.

(Links via Instapundit.)