Posted on 11/15/2012 9:17:34 AM PST by ProgressingAmerica
“That’s the foundation of our democracy” <<
.
Democracy??
Then we’re doomed. - We were supposed to have a representative Republic; democracy was the destructive force that the founders sought to defeat.
Possibly this is a nit, but the Founders saw no need to "defeat" democracy, since it didn't exist anywhere at the time.
They intended to keep democracy from developing, but that's not exactly the same thing as trying to defeat it.
Of course, just a few years after the Founding they got a good look at "democracy" in action with the French Revolution. It's hard to imagine a better object lesson as to the risks of democracy.
All representative Republics in the past have degenerated toward democracy, and then failed.
Dead people don’t vote in a Republic. They do in a Democracy due to the inherent flaws of letting a mob rule and scoundrels holding offices.
A quote from your last link gives us a glimpse of how socialists thought about the races of mankind in 1905:
“Says Dr. Francis Galton, of the highest authority in anthropological science, “A population of ninety thousand produced two men, Socrates and Phidias, whom the whole population of Europe has never equaled, and fourteen men of an ability to which the Anglo-Saxon race has only produced, in two thousand years, five equals.” He asserts that the average ability of the Athenian race was about as much above that of the English race as that race is above the African negro. This is a strong statement, and yet J. A. Symonds, one of the foremost literary and artistic critics of our own or of any day, favorably quotes it, and says that the population of classic Athens, taken as a whole, was perhaps as superior to ours as our race is to that of the Australian savage.”
Untrue. The franchise, even for federal elections, was established by the states. At the Founding the qualifications were quite diverse, with something like half the states, including NC(!), allowing free black men the franchise, and a couple, if I remember correctly, allowing some women to vote.
Over the next few decades the franchise in every state was broadened to include all white men, but restricted to exclude women in all states and blacks in almost all.
But the federal government wasn't involved in this process.
Possibly. Care to provide examples? Especially if you're going to use words like "all."
I would contend that a lot of representative democracies have failed, but a lot of them not from an excess of democracy. Often quite the opposite, with oligarchies or aristocracies gradually acquiring more power.
It also should be pointed out that there were no representative Republics in the ancient world. The novel idea of electing representatives to govern grew out of the middle ages.
Yeah right, Chavez. That’s what fought and won WWII. Ever hear of the Arsenal of Democracy? El Stupido!
Well if only white men were permitted to vote, we would not have the current occupant in the WH and trillions in debt.
“I have more to do for this country and these people.”
And Chavez thought: “And I intend to give it to these fools long and hard until they see the superiority of the Marxist revolution.”
Capitalism is impossible to sustain in a democracy once people lose the taste for freedom.
Once people figure out they outnumber the owner of the convenience store, its free beer until the beer runs out.
... unless the convenience store owner has an “assault weapon”.
True.
But we also wouldn’t be living up to the ideals expressed in our Declaration.
Which to some extent may indicate the flaws of those ideals when we attempt to put them into practice.
The political system of the Founding Fathers is based on the principle that in order to secure natural rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Consent of the governed requires some sort of variant of democracy as opposed to absolutism or totalitarianism
It is the absurd propaganda of socialism that states that under socialism all economic decisions will be arrived at democratically.
You make my point for me.
Democracy must inexorably become oligarchy (which is a sort of self-appointed monarchy of committee).
On second thought, the ideals aren’t flawed, but the people who are needed to implement them are.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.