Back to Basics

The word democracy comes from the Greek words’ “demos ( people) and “kratos” (power) and can be thought of as “the power of the people.”  Democracy is a system of government that depends on the will of the people.  However, the word democracy appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights, begging the question,  why is the Left making it the theme of the 2024 election, i.e. ‘Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy?’

The answer is simple, because it’s a part of the Left’s well-orchestrated game of mirror politics –  the technique where one political party falsely attributes its own motives and/or intentions to its adversaries and is reminiscent of the quote often attributed to Karl Marx, “Accuse your enemies of what it is that you are doing because it plants the seeds of confusion.”   Meanwhile, most Americans are blithely unaware of how this tactic is slowly, subtly, and surely eroding the ideals this nation was founded upon.

~ The differences are manifest ~

Democracy is a form of government in which the people periodically elect their leaders by a majority vote.  The elected leaders in turn have the power to make laws they see fit and do so by a majority vote among themselves.  Meanwhile in a constitutional republic, leaders are also elected by a majority vote and those leaders also make laws by a majority vote among themselves.  However, unlike a pure democracy, in a constitutional republic, like the USA, the elected legislators don’t have a blank check and are restricted from making laws that do not comport with the Constitution.  In other words, there are limitations as to what are leaders can and cannot do.  If that’s not clear, allow me to put this into more basic terms.  A republic is a state that’s governed by representatives of the citizen body and where sovereignty rests with the people, while a democracy is essentially two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner.

The ideal of a democracy is universal equality, which masquerades as diversity, equity, & inclusion, while ideal of a constitutional republic is individual liberty.  And when people are confused about something as basic as their form of government the result is chaos, which we see daily in the form of in the form of woke ideology and the cancel culture whose proponents’ primary goal is confusing & undermining the republican ideals of the Founders.

A dear friend sent me a video giving me the idea for today’s blog and as the video’s commentator stressed, one of the surest ways of undermining the predicate of the Founders is by subverting the language and referring to America as a democracy.  This insidious tactic is producing results as more Americans thoughtlessly accept this hideous distortion as the essence of representative government—which it absolutely is not!  As a result, we are unwittingly obscuring the very principles of the American founding.  And we need look no further than the teachers’ unions and our public schools with the conspicuous absence of American history in curriculums in favor of woke ideology, pronoun use, and ‘transgender rights.’  As Vladimir Lenin once said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

The Founders understood the new nation could easily slide into dictatorship, which in the 18^th century meant monarchy, such as those in Europe and whose process of governing was essentially totalitarian.  The Founders saw this clearly and were committed to protecting the new nation from becoming a pure democracy because a pure democracy is incompatible with the ideals of freedom & liberty.  And to be clear, democracy as a form of government is a very different animal than believing in democratic values.  Alexander Hamilton once said, “We are forming a republican form of government because real liberty is not found in democracy, and if we incline too much toward democracy we shall soon turn into a monarchy,” which in the 18^th century meant a totalitarian dictatorship.

The Founders understood they had to avoid the perils of what James Madison referred to as, “the tyranny of the majority.”  As the saying goes, the majority rules in a democracy, which is all well and good for the majority, but what about minority interests?  Look at what our universities have become under DEI policies i.e., indoctrination centers where suspension of the Bill of Rights is now a daily occurrence and where race and sexual orientation have supplanted merit as requirements for matriculation.

Similarly, our military is in receivership and unable to recruit because of the non-meritocratic standards of race, gender, and sexual orientation that now determines promotion and commendation.  So, is a republican form of government ideal?  Probably not…but regardless of what is it, or what it isn’t, it’s immeasurably more representative than “two wolves and a lamb…”  Nonetheless, I don’t think we’ll hear “Save our republican form of government” from the Left anytime soon.

Quote of the day:  “At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless.  Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.”― P.J. O’Rourke