Democracy is threatened by worship of elitism.

• Author: Forstmann, Theodore J.

"We have entered on Orwellian era wherein entitlement replaces responsibility; coercion is described as compassion; compulsory redistribution is called sharing; race quotas substitute for diversity; and suicide is prescribed as `death with dignity.'"

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. The power and significance of these 11 words reside in the fact that they represent a spiritual truth. This is not simply because Jesus said on the Mount, "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them," nor even because it is written in Mosaic law, "Whatever is hurtful to you, do not do to any other person." The spiritual authority of the Golden Rule is grounded in an even more basic assumption--that there is a Creator and that we are all equal in His eyes.

Our democracy was founded on this basic assumption, which is why we pledge our allegiance to "one nation under God." From this flows the self-evident truths "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights." What follows is that the individual is the spiritual center of society, and therefore the Golden Rule is self-evident as well.

Today, though, many of our leaders believe that the state--not the individual--is the spiritual center of society. According to this view, known as "statism," government assumes a moral importance that outweighs individual claims. Statists do not speak of government as a collection of bureaucrats, agencies, and limited constitutional powers, but as the embodiment of the collective good--as community itself.

They believe that government should make decisions for individuals. Since individuals usually prefer to make their own decisions, coercion and compulsion become necessary correctives. This is why the statist has no use for the Golden Rule. The statist does not do unto others as he would have others do unto him. The others aren't to do at all; they are to be done to and done for.

If it is true, as philosopher Michael Novak once observed, that "each immoral action sows its own irrationality into the pattern of events," a government that breaks the moral laws encoded in the Golden Rule will have a profound effect on all those living under it. The genesis and genius of the Golden Rule is that it is a two-way street. Statism, on the other hand, is a one-way street. The Golden Rule teaches us that we are all brothers. Statism teaches us that we are the children, and government is the parent.

In fact, statists are looking for far more than a maternal embrace in the arms of big government. They are looking for nothing less than a New Jerusalem, literally for redemption through the state.

Every human being has a need to believe and belong. Traditionally, this impulse found expression through religion. Even with the decline of clerical power in the 18th century, the search for salvation did not come to an end. Instead, the intellectuals of the day began to look elsewhere for idols and answers, for kinship and community. As author Paul Johnson observes in Intellectuals: "For the first time in human history ... men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects: more, that they could devise formulae whereby not merely the structure of society but the fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed.... [These] were not servants and interpreters of the gods but substitutes. Their hero was Prometheus, who stole the celestial fire and brought it to earth."

In 1789, the Promethean spark burst into the flames of the French Revolution. Historian Will Durant recounts that revolutionary leaders "proclaimed a new theology in which Nature would be God, and heaven would be an earthly utopia in which all men would be good." The Cathedral of Notre Dame was renamed the Temple of Reason; priests and...