ABSTRACT
Democratic theory suggests that the quality of the judgment of citizens can be worth considering. The issue of moral and cultural relativism assumes unusual importance in a book by David Spitz, called Patterns of Anti-Democratic Thought. Democracy has held that men in general are worthy of the dignity of a person because he has moral responsibility in a moral order, and because of this he has both the right and the duty to have a government to which he has given his consent. In order to defend democracy, it must be more than a myth, or a relative product of a particular culture. Value as myth, value as purely relative to culture, or value as unprovable hypothesis, is easily corrupted into a form of political romanticism that destroys democracy and it can be used to justify the romantic and nationalistic tyranny of time. Christians, Nazis, and communists are about equally dangerous to the forward march of democracy.
