The November issue of First Things, the conservative monthly, features a symposium called “The End of Democracy: The Judicial Usurpation of Politics. ” Its introduction, by editor in chief Richard John Neuhaus, suggests that an unrestrained judiciary is seizing control of crucial sections of American life and taking decision-making power away from the democratic process and the American people. “If so, we are witnessing the end of democracy,” Neuhaus writes. Then, citing a papal encyclical on the supremacy of moral law over secular power, Neuhaus warns, “America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany, but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here.”

The symposium asks whether Americans have a duty to commit civil disobedience or even “morally justified revolution” against such a “regime.” For the existing U.S. government may be not only undemocratic, but immoral. Neuhaus posits: “Law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality.” If the conflict is between loyalty to state and loyalty to God, then surely duty to God comes first. “We are prepared for the charge that publishing this symposium is irresponsibly provocative and even alarmist,” his introduction declares.