In both cases, the civitas and the state, capable of maintaining and guaranteeing peace, security, and predictability, ceased to exist, and the political condition of the anarchic war of all against all that characterized the external international order was introduced inside state and society."
Republics and Democracies
"By the time of the American Revolution and Constitution, the meanings of the words “republic” and “democracy” had been well established and were readily understood. And most of this accepted meaning derived from the Roman and Greek experiences. The two words are not, as most of today’s Liberals would have you believe -- and as most of them probably believe themselves -- parallels in etymology, or history, or meaning. The word Democracy (in a political rather than a social sense, of course) had always referred to a type of government, as distinguished from monarchy, or autocracy, or oligarchy, or principate. The word Republic, before 1789, had designated the quality and nature of a government, rather than its structure. When Tacitus complained that “it is easier for a republican form of government to be applauded than realized,” he was living in an empire under the Caesars and knew it. But he was bemoaning the loss of that adherence to the laws and to the protections of the constitution which made the nation no longer a republic; and not to the f act that it was headed by an emperor.
The word democracy comes from the Greek and means, literally, government by the people. The word “republic” comes from the Latin, res publica, and means literally “the public affairs.” The word “commonwealth,” as once widely used, and as still used in the official title of my state, “the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” is almost an exact translation and continuation of the original meaning of res publica. And it was only in this sense that the Greeks, such as Plato, used the term that has been translated as “republic.” Plato was writing about an imaginary “commonwealth”; and while he certainly had strong ideas about the kind of government this Utopia should have, those ideas were not conveyed nor foreshadowed by his title.
The historical development of the meaning of the word republic might be summarized as follows. The Greeks learned that, as Dr. Durant puts it, “man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.” The Romans applied the formerly general term “republic” specifically to that system of government in which both the people and their rulers were subject to law. That meaning was recognized throughout all later history, as when the term was applied, however inappropriately in fact and optimistically in self-deception, to the “Republic of Venice” or to the “Dutch Republic.” The meaning was thoroughly understood by our Founding Fathers. As early as 1775 John Adams had pointed out that Aristotle (representing Greek thought), Livy (whom he chose to represent Roman thought), and Harington (a British statesman), all “define a republic to be a government of laws and not of men.” And it was with this full understanding that our constitution-makers proceeded to establish a government which, by its very structure, would require that both the people and their rulers obey certain basic laws -- laws which could not be changed without laborious and deliberate changes in the very structure of that government. 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 features 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 Con vention 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 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 had 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."
At another time Hamilton said: “We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.” And 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 as 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 of America.
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 all of the Nineteenth Century and the very 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 expenditures 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 American Congress in 1935. And 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 consumes 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, lie 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.”
But it was a great Englishman, G. K. Chesterton, who put his finger on the basic reasoning behind all the continued and determined efforts of the Communists to convert our republic into a democracy. “You can never have a revolution,” he said, “in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.”
And in 1931 the Duke of Northumberland, in his booklet, The History of World Revolution, stated: “The adoption of Democracy as a form of Government by all European nations is fatal to good Government, to liberty, to law and order, to respect for authority, and to religion, and must eventually produce a state of chaos from which a new world tyranny will arise.” While an even more recent analyst, Archibald E. Stevenson, summarized the situation as follows: “De Tocqueville once warned us,” he wrote, “that: ‘If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event will arise from the unlimited tyranny of the majority.’ But a majority will never be permitted to exercise such ‘unlimited tyranny’ so long as we cling to the American ideals of republican liberty and turn a deaf ear to the siren voices now calling us to democracy. This is not a question relating to the form of government. That can always be changed by constitutional amendment. It is one affecting the underlying philosophy of our system -- a philosophy which brought new dignity to the individual, more safety for minorities and greater justice in the administration of government. We are in grave danger of dissipating this splendid heritage through mistaking it for democracy.”
And there have been plenty of other voices to warn us."
Robert Welch - September 17, 1961
Congressman Ron Paul's Resolution 443 Supports the Constitution - December 6, 2000
"Well, leave it to Ron Paul, Congressional Representative from Texas, and the most Constitutional of all Congressmen, to come forward in defense of the Electoral College. Here is the text of the House Concurrent Resolution he has JUST put forward to remind everyone that this is a REPUBLIC, NOT A DEMOCRACY, and to re-affirm our Constitutional Presidential electoral process. I whole-heartedly support this Res. and urge all of you to call your Congressmen now and get them to co-sponsor it, or at least support it. Way to go Rep. Paul!"
Stop the LIE~~We are a REPUBLIC not a Democracy: Support Res. 443
Training Manual
No. 20000-25
War Department
Washington, November 30, 1928
DEMOCRACY:
REPUBLIC:
A Republic is a form of government under a constitution which provides for the election of (1) an executive and (2) a legislative body, who working together in a representative capacity, have all the power of appointment, all power of legislation, all power to raise revenue and appropriate expenditures, and are required to create (3) a judiciary to pass upon the justice and legality of their governmental acts and to recognize (4) certain inherent individual rights. Take away any one or more of those four elements and you are drifting into autocracy. Add one or more to those four elements and you are drifting into democracy.
Superior to all others. : Autocracy declares the divine right of kings; its authority can not be questioned; its powers are arbitrarily or unjustly administered.
Democracy is the "direct" rule of the people and has been repeatedly tried without success.
Which one most closely resembles what our constitution says? A republic.
Which one most closely mirrors the Communist Manifesto? A democracy.
Our Constitutional fathers in their divine wisdom, knew the strength and weakness of both autocracy and democracy and with fixed principles definitely in mind, they defined a representative republican form of government. These leaders who were so far ahead of their time made a very clear and concise distinction between a republic and a democracy and they are recorded throughout the history of their time stating over and over and over so no one would get it wrong, that they had founded a republic.
James Madison Explains the Constitution to Thomas Jefferson
From Here: Republic To Democracy
Democracy and Mobocracy are synonyms for a form of government in which the majority (mob) rules, and which by definition, guarantees the absence of minority rights. In a true democracy the only law is that of the majority. Each level of government would have to have the people vote on every decision, no matter how trivial. The democratic form of governing is only functional when all the people in a region can be assembled for the purpose of deciding on the issues at hand, thus it can only function properly in very small applications, such as townships.
In a republic elections are held in order for the people to elect representatives and the people entrust their representatives to administer the functions of government in their behalf. This form of government can function in vast arenas and assures each person of representation. This is the form of government our founding fathers selected for this country.
While a republic practices a form of democracy via the elections of representatives and the representatives pass laws and amendments according to the rules of majority voting, the existence of representatives (Congressmen and Senators) and the establishment of our Constitution differentiate our Republic from a democracy.
The Constitution, and especially of the first ten amendments we call "The Bill of Rights"; were written to assure the rule of law and not of men, and as Jefferson put it, to "bind men down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution".
In other words; If you personally voted on the budget, the current tax codes, whether our military should bomb The Sudan, and how much money should go to Alabama for welfare, social services, child care, etc., which street in Yahoo County should be paved next, then you would be living in a democracy. Unfortunately it is not feasible for all 250,000,000 US citizens to gather and vote on every little issue, so in their infinite wisdom our founding fathers selected to establish a republican form of government...
In recent history, it seems that for some reason, the people and or the government have somehow decided that "Republic" is not politically desirable, so self appointed political scholars have "invented" the terms "direct democracy", "indirect democracy" and "representative democracy" with the direct democracy being a democracy as defined above and an indirect democracy or representative democracy being a "Republic".
WHY???, Neither our vocabulary nor our dictionary required these updates. A republic is a republic and a democracy is a democracy. For some reason, someone decided to take great strides to keep from using the historically and grammatically correct term for our republican form of government, so they seem to have just pulled "indirect", "direct", and "representative" democracy out of thin air. What gave them the right??? How long will it take to correct this blunder? Did the democrats in power at the time, just have a terrible dislike and inability to say "republic", so they decided to change our language and confuse the issue? If anyone out there knows and especially if you have any documentation, please advise the Webmaster because I would sincerely like to know the reason(s)...
The use of the term "Democracy" when related to The United States form of government offends me, especially when the term is used by our representatives, who are supposed to be educated and aware of our Constitution and the intentions and desires of our founding fathers. They, after all, take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of this nation. Sometimes, I wonder if they have ever even read, much less understood, the document this nation was founded upon.
The following are definitions, notables, and quotes, many of which show just how little our founding fathers and other well known scholars and statesmen thought of the democratic form of government.
DEFINITIONS:
*** Comment: Between 1927 and 1952 our military apparently succumbed to left wing propaganda!!! ***
QUOTES:
NOTABLES:
The Most Important Notable!!!
SUMMATION:
The continuing degradation of our form of government from a republic to a democracy is just another example of the regressive tendencies invading this country. We must all attempt to correct these tendencies, before our Nation loses it’s greatness and it’s standing in the global community of the new millennium. We must strive to resurrect and maintain those wonderful ideals that our founding fathers so graciously and thoughtfully bestowed upon us...
"Some words can make a man's heart warm. Republic is one of them."
John Wayne - The Alamo
Text of Bush's victory speech
"After six days of voting, and 36 ballots, the House of Representatives elected Thomas Jefferson the third president of the United States. That election brought the first transfer of power from one party to another in our new democracy."
Text of Vice President Al Gore's concession speech
"Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came, and now it has ended, resolved, as it must be resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy."
"Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity of the people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession."
"And I say to our fellow members of the world community, let no one see this contest as a sign of American weakness. The strength of American democracy is shown most clearly through the difficulties it can overcome."
Ramadan Turkey, Wearing rags on your head and being home in time for Christmas. Allahmas.
He keeps using that word. I don't think it means what he thinks it means.
His description of government enforcing the "neutrality" of society in a democracy is interesting. Neutrality, here, means a point of equilibrium for a system always under tension.
It's interesting to relate the "neutrality" of modern art with politics. Cubism is often described as presenting different views at the same time, and Mondrian, later, balanced primary colors and rectangular shapes to achieve nonrepresentational harmony. What then, I wonder, do the large, single band of color paintings by Rothko portend?
I think this is problematic. Supremacy of the individual leaves no room for majoritarian decisions, typical in a democracy, since individual rights are not subject to legislation. On the other hand,the supremacy of the collective -- for example, a welfare state, a national project of the kind Germany was so keen on, or a social experiment of Marxism-Leninism require constant attention and adjustment by the state.