Democracy vs. Republic
T MAG300
call our political system in this country a "democracy" !
I say to you: **** Indisputably, this nation was founded as a republic
and its leaders were justifiably afraid of "democracy," lest it destroy
the nation they had risked their lives to establish.****
Do you actually know what a democracy is ?
About 370 BC, Plato wrote: "A democracy is a state in which the poor,
gaining the upper hand, kill some and banish others, and then divide the
offices among the remaining citizens equally."
About 126 BC, Polybius wrote: "The common people feel themselves
oppressed by the grasping of some, and their vanity is flattered by
others. Fired with evil passions, they are no longer willing to submit to
control, but demand that
everything be subject to their authority. The invariable result is that
the government assumes the noble names of free and popular, but becomes in
fact the most execrable thing, mob rule,"
And about 63 BC, Seneca, a Roman, wrote: "Democracy is more cruel than
wars or tyrants."
One of the 1993 Merriam-Webster's definitions of "democracy" is: "the
absence of
hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges." Yet
today, "democratic"
America is riven by class distinction, class envy, and class warfare.
Further more, As historians Charles Austin Beard and Mary Ritter Beard
wrote (1939): "At no time, at no place, in solemn convention assembled,
through no chosen agents, had the American people officially proclaimed
the United States to be a democracy. The Constitution did not contain the
word or any word lending countenance to it, except possibly the mention of
'We, the people,' in the preamble...When the Constitution was framed, no
respectable person called himself a democrat."
Also, As recently as in a 1928 U.S. Army training manual it was described
thusly: "Democracy: A government of the masses. Authority derived
through mass meeting or any form of 'direct' expression. Results in
mobocracy. Attitude toward laws is that the will of the majority shall
regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion,
prejudice or impulse, without regard to consequences. Results in
demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy."
Here is but a few examples of what our Founders had to say about it :
Thomas Jefferson, March 11, 1790: "The republican is the only form of
government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of
mankind."
Thomas Jefferson, July 30, 1795: "The revolution forced them (the
"people of America") to consider the subject for themselves, and the
result was an universal conversion to republicanism."
Thomas Jefferson, March 12, 1799: "The body of the American people is
substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played
upon by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful
maneuvers, & made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains
for themselves."
Edmund Jennings Randolph, in debate, stated: "Our chief danger arises
from
the democratic parts of our constitutions."
Alexander Hamilton, in Senate: "It has 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 feature of
good government. Their very character was tyranny: their figure
deformity,"
John Adams, in a letter to John Taylor, wrote: "Remember, democracy never
lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was
a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
James Madison said: "...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."
Thomas Jefferson