The following symposium addresses those questions, often in fresh ways, but also moves beyond them. The Federal District Court's decision favoring doctor-assisted suicide, we said, could be fatal not only to many people who are old, sick, or disabled, but also to popular support for our present system of government. This symposium addresses many similarly troubling judicial actions that add up to an entrenched pattern of government by judges that is nothing less than the usurpation of politics. The question here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime. Americans are not accustomed to speaking of a regime.
Regimes are what other nations have.
The American tradition abhors the notion of the rulers and the ruled. The traditions of democratic self-governance are powerful in our civics textbooks and in popular consciousness. This symposium asks whether we may be deceiving ourselves and, if we are, what are the implications of that self- deception. The question that is the title of this symposium is in no way hyperbolic. The subject before us is the end of democracy.