Do you remember when I showed you the truth about Democracy and Republic? In there, I quoted James Madison, our 4th President, who wrote several documents to defend the Constitution. He said, “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.” Now, as we watch things unfolding in Wisconsin and around the country, we are starting to see what he means. Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and Republican candidate for President in 2008 wrote the following in an email blast on March 15th:
“Immediately after the vote, protesters [in Wisconsin] streamed into the Capitol building, in violation of a judge’s order, and reportedly chained some doors shut and ripped others off their hinges. The next day, they tried to physically block Republicans from the lower house from coming to work. The FBI is even tracking down death threats made against the governor and GOP Assembly members. The protesters finally had to be dragged out of the Capitol by police, so the Assembly could vote.”
Sounds like turbulence and contention to me.
Now do you see why the Founders were ADAMANT that we NOT set up a Democracy? We can begin to see the damage that has been done in the previous century since President Wilson promised that we’d go to war to “make the world safe for Democracy.” Of course we could go back to Andrew Jackson to really find the beginning of our doom in this respect of drifting towards Democracy, but that would take too long here.
Look, I’m not arguing for or against the Wisconsin protestors, but merely pointing out where we are in the historic timeline. Since the time of the Populist Party, many have believed that a Democracy would be better than the Republic established by the Founders. These people, politicians, professors and regular people alike, have successfully blurred the lines to where, as a good postmodernist, neither word really means anything. That fact was made clear by something else Huckabee wrote, when he said, “You know, it’s ironic that when this first started, one of the most popular signs among the protesters read, “This is what democracy looks like.” No, democracy looks like the people’s elected representatives defying death threats to cast a vote. Their reaction to democracy was what anarchy looks like.”
Actually, Mike, you are wrong–in a Democracy, it is much like anarchy. Elbridge Gerry said it this way: “the evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. . .the worse. . .of all political evils.” Madison saw a republic as protecting us from the tyranny of the majority: “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.” There is a difference between Democracy and Anarchy, but not much—anarchy demands that no one be in charge–sort of a “I’ll leave you alone; you leave me alone” philosophy. A Democracy, on the other hand, admits there needs to be some sort of leadership (in Greece, there was a Council of 500), but ALL decisions are made by a vote. Huckabee is defending a Democracy, but using the definitions of a republic; the protester is defending Democracy as it really is. Messy, “majority rules” and, as Madison said, turbulent.
The scary part? Michael Moore’s response to Wisconsin was to say “this is war.” That doesn’t surprise me; we are clearly (as a nation) at a point where the philosophical divide is this vast; but immediately upon hearing his words, I thought about the rest of Madison’s statement about the ills of Democracy—“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.” If people like Moore are ready to go to war (and to be fair, so are many people from the Tea Party, from moveon.org, from Fox News, from CNN), then it becomes much easier to see how Democracy is incompatible with personal security or the rights of property. Worse? It becomes very easy to see how a Democracy is “violent in their deaths.”
Hang on everyone–the ride is about to get even more interesting.