Free Republic

resident Biden’s Sept. 1 speech in Philadelphia on “unity” is a poignant example of the confusion surrounding the concept of democracy. Mr. Biden declared that MAGA Republicans threaten “the very foundations of our republic.” The phrase a “threat to American democracy” is so commonplace these days that it hardly carries any meaning—except that it encapsulates the reigning ideology of our time, an ideology so pervasive that it almost goes unnoticed. It is like the air we breathe. I call it democratism. It is an imaginative and idealistic understanding of popular rule that disdains ordinary people and looks to a cadre...

High up on my list of annoyances are references to the United States as a democracy and the suggestion that Iraq should become a democracy. The word "democracy" appears in neither of our founding documents – the Declaration of Independence nor the U.S. Constitution. Our nation's founders had disdain for democracy and majority rule. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, said in a pure democracy, "there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual." During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph said that "in tracing these evils to their origin every man...

House International Relations Chairman Henry Hyde, the 81-year-old Illinois Republican, embodies the institutional memory of modern American foreign policy, which is why it mattered a great deal last week when he politely made plain he is not marching in President Bush’s global crusade for democracy. Hyde used a committee appearance by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to call America back toward what he called the “clear-eyed and sober-minded understanding of this world” embraced by our forebears. Hyde’s own “sober-minded understanding” is a morally responsible realism. “Fidelity to our ideals means that we have little choice but to support freedom around...

(EXCERPT: Click link above for full text) Russian PRshchiki: Snapshots from Two Regions Julie A. Corwin RFE/RL IU Russian Elections Workshop 17 February 2004 ...Political consultants in Russia generally have broader job descriptions than their counterparts in the West. Most of the firms engaged in “political technologies” in Russia offer a wide range of services from conducting focus groups and organizing opinion polling to producing paid political advertisements and designing media strategies for campaigns. Also involved in the mix can be a variety of "dirty" and "not-so-dirty" tricks ranging from digging up dirt on rival candidates and organizing the transportation...