Have you heard these claims lately?
- “We are defending our Democracy”
- “{insert conservative name here} is destroying Democracy!”
- “We can’t allow democracy to disappear!”
- “Democracy is under attack!”
But do you know that the word “democracy” cannot be found anywhere in the constitution or the 27 amendments? Nowhere does it imply that the citizens have a right to directly decide ANYTHING about the function of their government.
The Constitution describes a Representative Republic and a process for citizens to select representatives in a way that may “look” democratic but is not considered democracy. The amendments guarantee women and all races that are citizens access to that process with no mention of democracy.
This absence of the word was a purposeful choice of the framers. These men associated “pure democracy” with mob rule and instability, as occurred in ancient city-states. James Madison in Federalist 10 said it this way:
“A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. … The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.”
These men, creating a constitution for a tiny baby country, had the foresight to know that the US would not always be small, and they had to structure a Republic that would work for hundreds of millions of citizens.
So when the democrats and the leftists claim “democracy is being destroyed,” it is fair to point out that there has never been a democracy in the United States of America, and challenge them to find it in the Constitution.
The “democracy” the liberal left desires is a path of descent into the anarchy of mob rule the framers most feared.
So what is really under attack in our country?
That would be the fundamental right declared by the framers to “…secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…” That is stated in the preamble, and is a core purpose of the entire Constitution. “Liberty” is mentioned three more times in the Amendments to further reinforce the point. Unlike “democracy”, the meaning of “liberty” is crystal clear.
Democrats and the far left are using the vague term “democracy”, recognized by the majority our civics-challenged population to steal a core American Right.
Liberty.