In our lifetimes, American democracy has been radicalized:
The idea of equality has been extended beyond the carefully defined political sphere where the American Founding placed it, to the idea that everything is equal, that all types of men, all types of behavior are equal. The goal of equality has supplanted all other cultural and moral values and become the sole legitimating principle of this society. Today we have notions of absolute “life-style” equality; absolute cultural equality (as in multiculturalism); absolute equality of the races (as in the demand for statistical equality of results, and the belief that the ethnic and racial composition of our society should be a matter of complete indifference to us); and absolute sex equality (as in the feminization of the military). When you press people on these issues, you find that they have an implicit feeling that normative distinctions, upon which civilization just happens to be based, are inhumane. In order to avoid being inhumane to out-of-wedlock mothers, we must say that illegitimacy is as worthy of respect as legitimacy; and we end up with a nation of fatherless children. In order to avoid being inhumane to illegal immigrants, we give illegals virtually all the privileges of citizenship; and so on.
In earlier generations, Americans spoke not of “democracy” so much as of freedom. But freedom used to have a more complex meaning — it meant ordered freedom, freedom within the constitutional and moral order that makes that freedom possible.
Spot on observations, but it is even more radical: foreigners and “the other” are touted as superior to what has been. Thus immigrants “do work Americans just won’t do”; we give illegals in-state tuition rates, which puts foreign nationals above other US citizens; minorities et al. have suffered more, thus are worthy of more concern; etc.
The “holier than thou” death spiral continues apace.