There is a never-ending effort to fool us all into believing that we are a Democracy. That was never the intention of the great men who envisioned a nation like none other. Happily, we are not a Democracy of any kind. We are a Republic. The difference is distinct and important to Democrats and Republicans, and indeed all of our youth.
A Democracy is a form of government that is designed and managed by the majority. Political philosophers have identified its weakness and dangers for over 2,000 years. It is a government that can only fail.
The men who wrote our Constitution made great efforts to ensure that we do not become a democracy. Some of our readers may be shocked to learn this, but a study of the Constitution Convention journals makes it clear.
They knew a democracy was dangerous for any nation because it gave too much power to the poor. Readers are quickly thinking about what is wrong with that. What snobs we must be. But the poor will always outnumber the rich, so the poor eventually use their numbers to take the homes, money, and assets from the rich, and society eventually collapses. This isn’t opinion; it is recorded in history.
The “father of our Constitution,” James Madison, addressed the problems of democracy, which he called the popular form of government in Federalist #10. In our opinion, it is the most important of all the Federalist papers. He wrote in Federalist #10, one of many essays intended to further explain the importance of various portions of the Constitution:
“Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or property rights, and have generally been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
Our Constitutional Republic is different. We have a foundation of government set by our Constitution. All laws created by the government must be in consonance with its constitutional design. The Constitution is purposefully difficult to change because an amendment requires the approval of a two-thirds vote of both the Senate and House of Representatives, plus the ratification of three-fourths of the state legislatures to succeed.
The philosophy of our Constitution was to bind the states together in a very limited measure, with the federal government having little control over the internal operations of each state. Still, it would represent them in a national scope and international affairs.
Within our original Constitution, we find an area of popular input: the House of Representatives. Its members are elected to short, two-year terms to reflect the popular pressures of the people.But the Senate was far different in its design. The State Legislatures initially appointed its members, so the States officially had influence in Federal legislation and the appointment processes of the Federal Government.
We have long maintained that the state-appointed senators were the guardians of the Tenth Amendment. But sadly, those state-appointed senators disappeared when the wrong-headed 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913. From then on, senators were elected by a popular vote rather than than being selected by the desires of the state leadership. The difference became that we now have political party senators instead of state-appointed senators.
That change set forces in motion that, over time, gained enough power to vandalize our republic. All presidential appointments, all nominations for the judiciary, all treaties, and all legislation must receive Senate approval. Party politics had become more important than our Constitution with the new amendment. Because of this, we now have SCOTUS justices who ignore the Tenth Amendment, despite their swearing an oath to our laws and our Constitution.
The 17th Amendment was a massive strike against our republican form of government.
There remains one substantial element of our Republican form of government, and that is the Electoral College. It was designed to have our States decide who was to serve as president rather than by the popular vote. This, too, was to avoid the power of the mob. The leftist masses in control today have their sights set on eliminating the Electoral College and the Constitution.
If we lose the Electoral College, it will empower the SWAMP, which is composed of the current government bureaus across the nation, the politicians, attorneys, educators, and other “services” that have prospered with the incredible growth of our government, to become more powerful.
When doing the research for the senior author’s book, “The Real Constitution and its real enemies.” We found a quote by Richard Hofstadter that best describes the designs of the men who wrote our Constitution:
“The men who drew up the Constitution in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 had a vivid Calvinistic sense of human evil and damnation and believed with Hobbes that men are selfish and contentious. They [the delegates] were men of affairs, merchants, lawyers, planter-businessmen, speculators, and investors. Having seen human nature on display in the marketplace, the courtroom, the legislative chamber, and every secret path and alleyway where wealth and power are courted, they felt they knew it in all its frailty. To them, a human being was an atom of self-interest. They did not believe in man, but they did believe in the power of a good political Constitution to guide him.”
So that brings us to the bottom line: the Founding Fathers designed a republic that makes it difficult to change and difficult for corruption to take hold. But, as their government takes on more features of a democracy and submits itself to the power of the mob, it encourages change and corruption with it.
Note: Steven Maikoski is an essayist and author of the book, The Real Constitution: and its real enemies.
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