Is anyone else as sick of Democrats yapping about illusory “threats to our democracy” as I am?
The United States is not, and never has been a democracy, and those who wish to make it one represent the worst nightmares of America’s founding generation. By careful design the United States is not a “democracy,” it is a constitutional republic. The Founders were acutely aware of the differences and specifically rejected democracy because they saw it as a pathway to mob rule.
Indeed, Federalist Number 10 is titled, “The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection” and in it James Madison argues that:
Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.
Madison further argues that the answer to the problem of faction and mob rule is a constitutional republic:
The inference to which we are brought is, that the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS.
If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.
Madison’s answer, and the answer ultimately adopted by the founding generation of Americans, was to constrain the propensity to mob rule that is a fundamental characteristic of democracies with a written constitution and a federal system of government to diffuse power and create checks and balances against the rise of an oppressive majority.
Or as Madison put it:
It must be confessed that in this, as in most other cases, there is a mean, on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie. By enlarging too much the number of electors, you render the representatives too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects. The federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.
Today, the threats that concerned James Madison and the other Founders are rising not from Trump’s reasonable claims of election fraud, and his supporters’ anger over the stolen 2020 election, they are coming from Democrats who wish to unravel the careful compromises, and the checks and balances written into our Constitution and legislative rules and traditions.
Ask yourself, who is the greater threat to constitutional liberty? A few hundred unruly demonstrators at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, or:
The Constitution and our federal system of government were designed to protect us, as Madison put it, from “Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, [who] may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.” If there is a better description of Democrat politicians, such as Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, Gavin Newsom, Ayana Presley, Ilhan Omar and Kamala Harris we have yet to see it. So, when you hear Democrats yapping about “democracy” you know whom they are planning to empower.
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