Why is America a Republic and not a Democracy?
A few years ago, New York Times columnist and “1619 project” contributor Jamelle Bouie proclaimed that “in modern times, there is no difference between a republic and a democracy,” and he essentially revealed democracy’s ultimate goal of socialism when he said, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez understands democracy better than Republicans do.”
While some so-called conservatives have argued that the left really doesn’t understand why we’re a republic, we need to be willing to ask if they, or anyone else for that matter, truly understand the difference between a republic where liberty exists and a democracy where socialism reigns . . . and if it would make any difference even if they did.
When you consider that our Republic and the “limited” Constitution designed to restrict its powers were established to secure the same individual liberty that revolutionary collectivism has been targeting for destruction since before our inception, the answer to the previous question quickly becomes a resounding NO!
Because, regardless of how incoherent or convoluted the rhetoric of the revolutionary progressive collectivist may be, the end result of their efforts is NOT an understanding of the “idea” of America, but to effectively kill it! As a generation of men and women who might very well be the last champions of liberty, the difference is something we need to understand.
When we look at the difference between being a republic or a democracy from the perspective of their revolution, it’s easier to understand the objectives of progressive collectivists and how misleading, incoherent, and confusing their diatribe truly is. Still, it can still be hard to unravel the confusion, especially in the minds of the growing number of children in our public schools who are being force-fed a steady stream of anti-American tenets as a matter of mandatory critical curricula.
From a liberty perspective, what needs to be asked is this: Do we, as champions of liberty and 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 because our existence as a constitutional republic — as author Michele Alexander puts it in The New Jim Crow, is all that stands 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 is the contract that protects liberty and prevents the government from having the power it needs to establish a socialist state. And our republic, much to the frustration of these revolutionaries, was created specifically to keep that from happening.
In addition to securing the liberty and empowerment of the minority from the whims of a tyrannical majority bent on socialism, our republic is designed to be a “check” on the spread of the anti-republic/pro-democracy agenda of people hostile to liberty; it’s also designed to slow down the implementation of their objectives so that we might have the time to reconsider.
This works against the objectives of revolutionary collectivists in two important ways:
- It prevents the unchecked spread of what Madison referred to in Federalist #10 as “factions” 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” their revolution makes, the more collective our society becomes. And by definition, collectivism demands the implementation of its ever-expanding need for more and more regulation.
An easy way to visualize how our republic works compared to a democracy 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 — city, town, county, state, and federal — are supposed to work in the same way.
Equally important to understanding how the checks in our republic work is knowing and recognizing why the progressive revolution needs to eliminate them.
Part of our understanding can be found in Marxist doctrine, and in particular the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. This phase of the revolution doesn’t only mark “the downfall of all the privileged classes,” it also establishes “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 won’t matter if people understand the difference between a liberty-loving republic and a socialism-loving democracy until we fully understand the progressive’s prime revolutionary directive to destroy America.
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
