Democracy Versus Republic {Stop calling it a Democracy}

http://www.patriots-of-the-republic.com ^ | June 30, 1986 | General Birch Services Corp.

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

Democracy Versus Republic

When our Founding Fathers established a "republic," in the hope, as

Benjamin Franklin said, that we could keep it, and when they guaranteed to

every state within that "republic" a "republican form" of government, they

well knew the significance of the terms they were using. And were doing all

in their power to make the feature of government signified by those terms

as permanent as possible. They also knew very well indeed the meaning of

the word democracy, and the history of democracies; and they were

deliberately doing everything in their power to avoid for their own times,

and to prevent for the future, the evils of a democracy.

Let's look at some of the things they said to support and clarify this

purpose. On May 31,1787, Edmund Randolph told his fellow members of the

newly assembled Constitutional Convention that the object for which the

delegates had met was "to provide a cure for the evils under which the

United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every

man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy...."

The Founders Knew the Difference

The delegates to the Convention were clearly in accord with this

statement.   At about the same time another delegate, Elbridge Gerry, said: "The evils

we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want

(that is, do not lack) virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots."

And on June 21,1788, Alexander Hamilton made a speech in which he stated:

       It had been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable

would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no

position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the

people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of

government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.

Another time Hamilton said: "We are a Republican Government. Real liberty

is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy." Samuel Adams

warned: "Remember, Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts

and  murders itself! There never was a democracy that 'did not commit

suicide."' James Madison, one of the members of the Convention who was

charged with drawing up our Constitution, wrote follows:

       . . . democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and

contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or

the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives

as  they have been violent in their deaths.

Madison and Hamilton and Jay and their compatriots of the Convention

prepared and adopted a Constitution in which they nowhere even mentioned

the word democracy, not because they were not familiar with such a form of

government, but because they were. The word democracy had not occurred in

the Declaration of Independence, and does not appear in the constitution

of  a single one of our fifty states-which constitutions are derived mainly

from the thinking of the Founding Fathers of the Republic- for the same

reason. They knew all about Democracies, and if they had wanted one for

themselves and their posterity, they would have founded one. Look at all

the elaborate system of checks and balances which they established; at the

carefully worked-out protective clauses of the Constitution itself, and

especially of the first ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights; at the

effort, as Jefferson put it, to "bind men down from mischief by the chains

of the Constitution," and thus to solidify the rule not of men but of

laws.   All of these steps were taken, deliberately, to avoid and to prevent a

Democracy, or any of the worst features of a Democracy, in the United

States.

And so our Republic was started on its way. And for well over a hundred

years our politicians, statesmen, and people remembered that this was a

republic, not a democracy, and knew what they meant when they made that

distinction. Again, let's look briefly at some of the evidence.

Washington, in his first inaugural address, dedicated himself to "the

preservation . . . of the republican model of government." Thomas

Jefferson, our third president, was the founder of the Democratic Party;

but in his first inaugural address, although he referred several times to

the Republic or the republican form of government he did not use the word

"democracy" a single time. And John Marshall, who was Chief Justice of the

Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, said: "Between a balanced republic and a

democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos."

Throughout the Nineteenth Century and the early part of the Twentieth,

while America as a republic was growing great and becoming the envy of the

whole world, there were plenty of wise men, both in our country and

outside  of it, who pointed to the advantages of a republic, which we were

enjoying,  and warned against the horrors of a democracy, into which we might fall.

Around the middle of that century, Herbert Spencer, the great English

philosopher, wrote, in an article on The Americans: "The Republican form

of  government is the highest form of government; but because of this it

requires the highest type of human nature-a type nowhere at present

existing."

And in truth we have not been a high enough type to preserve the

republic we then had, which is exactly what he was prophesying.

Thomas Babington Macaulay said: "I have long been convinced that

institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or

civilization, or both." And we certainly seem to be in a fair way today to

fulfill his dire prophecy. Nor was Macaulay's contention a mere personal

opinion without intellectual roots and substance in the thought of his

times. Nearly two centuries before, Dryden had already lamented that ~no

government had ever been, or ever can be, wherein timeservers and

blockheads will not be uppermost." And as a result, he had spoken of

nations being "drawn to the dregs of a democracy." While in 1795 Immanuel

Kant had written: "Democracy is necessarily despotism."

In 1850 Benjamin Disraeli, worried as was Herbert Spencer at what was

already being foreshadowed in England, made a speech to the British House

of Commons in which he said: "If you establish a democracy, you must in

due  time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great

impatience of public burdens, combined in due season with great increase

of  public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from

passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace

ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your

authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season

find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete."

Disraeli could have made that speech with even more appropriateness before

a joint session of the United States Congress in 1935. In 1870 he had

already come up with an epigram which is strikingly true for the United

States today. "The world is weary," he said, "of statesmen whom democracy

has degraded into politicians."

But even in Disraeli's day there were similarly prophetic voices on this

side of the Atlantic. In our own country James Russell Lowell showed that

he recognized the danger of unlimited majority rule by writing:

       Democracy gives every man The right to be his own oppressor.

W.H. Seward pointed out that "Democracies are prone to war, and war con-

sumes them." This is an observation certainly borne out during the past

fifty years exactly to the extent that we have been becoming a democracy

and fighting wars, with each trend as both a cause and an effect of the

other one. And Ralph Waldo Emerson issued a most prophetic warning when he

said: "Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors." If

Emerson could have looked ahead to the time when so many of the editors

would themselves be a part of, or sympathetic to, the gang of bullies, as

they are today, he would have been even more disturbed. And in the 1880's

Governor Seymour of New York said that the merit of our Constitution was,

not that it promotes democracy, but checks it.

Across the Atlantic again, a little later, Oscar Wilde once contributed

this epigram to the discussion: "Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of

the people, by the people, for the people." While on this side, and after

the first World War had made the degenerative trend in our government so

visible to any penetrating observer, H.L. Mencken wrote: "The most popular

man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most

despotic  man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him

to boss them. Their natural gait is the goosestep." While Ludwig Lewisohn

observed: "Democracy, which began by liberating men politically, has

developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of

majorities and the deadly power of their opinion."

"... democracies have ever been spectacles

of turbulence and contention; have ever been

found incompatible with personal security or

the rights of property; and have in general been

as short in their lives as they have been violent

in their deaths."

James Madison, known as the father of the U.S.

Constitution,  in "Essay #10" of The Federalist

Papers: ".

[I pledge allegiance to the flag..... and to the REPUBLIC for

which it stands...!]

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

Why the Democrats fail to see this is Agenda driven blind ambition not to lead but to control !

[beyond the sea]

We don't need no stinkin' MOB RULE!

[gortklattu]

This should be THE subject of the next four years.

[SpaceBar]

A "democracy" is what you get when a bunch of british mutineers shack up on an island near french polynesia and vote on which women to rape.

[cmsgop]

Soooo Bookmarked!

[JSteff]

"The Founders Knew the Difference"

I have always said the Founders were divinely inspired. It was so long ago yet every place where we have left their written Constitution we have created problems for ourselves.

I just hope we do not continue the slide away from their words and documents.

[zahal724]

Democracy is 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who is to be for dinner.

[agitator]

"....in a Republic, voting on dinner is expressly prohibited and the sheep are ARMED."

[Angry Republican]

Ping for later reading.

[Montresor]

Democrat used to be a derogatory term referring to someone who panders to the masses. Wait, why did I say "used to be".

[NeonKnight]

Actually, The US is a Democracy. A Democratic Republic. There are not exclusive. There are various forms of Democracy, and a Democratic Republic is one of them.

[SBOinTX]

Bashing on Democracy in this time of right and necessary wars to instill Democracy around the world does not help our cause right now.

[netmilsmom]

Thanks for the ready made HS History lesson.

((((hugs)))))

[eagle11]

Article IV, Section 4. Congress shall guarantee each State a Republican Form of Government.....

[Taggart_D]

ping

[PISANO]

I wonder when the last time was when a politician or the MSM said we are a REPUBLIC? I can NOT remember EVER hearing that term used. OTOH I hear we are a Democracy virtually everyday by the MSM or some Politician.

I guess it is for the same reason that the RED STATES are REPUBLICAN rather than the Socialist Party of America [Democrats]. Say it often and it becomes a FACT, and people honestly believe it is true.

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[Earthdweller]

ping

[dalereed]

When I was in school 60 years ago democracy was a dirty word!

[GeekDejure]

I wonder when the last time was when a politician or the MSM said we are a REPUBLIC? I can NOT remember EVER hearing that term used.
=====
What else would you expect?

Democrats = Democracy

Republicans = Republic

The MSM suffers the disease of Democrats = Democracy !!!