On The Ben Shapiro Show last week, Shapiro addressed some assertions being put out there by New York Times columnist and “1619 project” contributor Jamelle Bouie about how “in modern times there is no difference between a republic and a democracy” and how “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez understands democracy better than Republicans do.”
In a fairly weak rebuttal, Shapiro dismissed Bouie’s assertions by concluding that “the left really doesn’t understand why we’re a republic.” To which I can only ask, would it matter if they did?
When you consider that the very Republic — and the “limited” Constitution designed to restrict it — were established to secure the same individual liberty that revolutionary collectivism has targeted for destruction since before our inception, the answer quickly becomes a resounding NO! Regardless of how incoherent or convoluted the rhetoric of any revolutionary progressive collectivist is, the end of their efforts is NOT to understand the “idea” of America, but to kill it!
And that’s what we as champions of liberty really need to understand. As a matter of fact, from the perspective of the revolution, the more misleading, incoherent, and confusing their diatribes the better and the harder they become to unravel. Especially for the growing number of kids in school now being force-fed the anti-American tenets of this revolution as a matter of mandatory critical curricula.
From a liberty perspective, what needs to be asked is, do we as champions of individual liberty (and therefore, of our Constitutional Republic) understand why progressive collectivists on both the left and the right are pushing for a direct democracy in the first place? The answer is simple. It’s because our Constitutional Republic, as author of The New Jim Crow Michele Alexander puts it, is standing in the way of their “revolutionary birth” of America as “a new nation” — a socialist nation.
For socialism to ever become fully established in America, the Constitution has to go because it prevents the government from ever having the power needed to enforce it. And our republic, much to the frustration of these revolutionaries, was put in place to help prevent that from happening.
In addition to its purpose of securing the liberty and empowerment of the minority from the whims of a tyrannical majority, our republic is meant to work as a check on the spread of sentiments among the people potentially hostile to liberty, and it’s also designed to slow down the process of their implementation so that we might have the time to reconsider.
All of these things work against the revolutionary collectivist in two important ways:
- It prevents the unchecked spread of what Madison refers to in Federalist #10 as “faction” or by what might better be understood in contemporary terms as the populism of an unchecked spread of revolutionary sentiment throughout the land
- The more “progress” the revolution makes, the more collective society becomes. And by definition, collectivism demands the immediate implementation of its ever-expanding need for more and more regulation.
An easy way to visualize how our republic works is to picture how a ship or submarine is sectioned off to prevent a fire or leak in one section from burning up or sinking the whole ship. The layers of our government – village/city, town, county, state, and federal are supposed to work in the same way; hence, the relentless progressive effort to compromise their autonomy at every opportunity.
What’s equally important to understanding how the checks in our republic work is in recognizing why the revolution needs to eliminate them. The answer is found in Marxist doctrine, and in particular its “dictatorship of the proletariat”. This phase of the revolution doesn’t only mark “the downfall of all the privileged classes,” it maintains “the revolution in permanence until the realization of communism.”
In understanding these things, we begin to see that until the relative stability of our republic has been replaced by the volatile instability of a “direct democracy,” a dictatorship in the form of the proletariat or any of the other alleged “oppressed classes” just isn’t going to happen. And with that, a little light is shined on what Lenin was getting at when he said, “there is no other road to socialism save the road through democracy.”
In the end, it doesn’t matter if Shapiro or anyone else understands why we’re a republic or not, as it would change nothing in the prime revolutionary directive to destroy it.
Joe Marshall was born and raised in the Finger Lakes Region of Upstate NY. He is a married father of two grown sons, an outdoorsman, a landscape contractor, a former stock car owner and driver, a certified 4H firearms instructor, and a retired New York State corrections officer.
Joe is the author of the book, Last Call for Liberty
