The Founders were clear on what form of government they intended to create—a republic. They were also clear on what kind of republic—a revolutionary kind never before seen. The basic principles are laid out in the Declaration of Independence—a republican form of government that protects individual rights equally at all times, requires the consent of the governed, and limits the elected officials to that function, thus protecting rights from the tyranny of the majority.
Yet America’s Founding is widely misunderstood today, thanks largely to the Democratic Party’s centuries long, largely successful reactionary campaign to recast America as a Democracy. Thus it was of interest to me to come across Theodore R. Johnson’s Washington Post article American democracy is fine. It’s the republic that’s in trouble. He’s right, and points in the right directioin. But he still gets some things wrong.
I posted these comments, slightly edited for clarity:
America is not a “democratic republic.” It is a constitutionally limited republic, in which, contrary to Biden and the Democratic party, the inalienable rights of the individual to personal self-governance trumps the vote. When Biden said “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow,” he got it exactly backward. Our fundamental rights do not depend on other people’s vote—they are protected from it. Of course, Biden’s reactionary view is the totalitarian heart of his party that dates back to its pro-slavery “states rights” origins, which held that the enslavement of a segment of Americans could be determined by vote.
America is not based on rule by “the peoples’ will”; i.e., majority rule. That’s a totalitarian concept and leads not to a free, peaceful civil society but to Robespierre and Napoleon. America is a nation that protects individual rights from “the tyranny of the many”—democracy. The people’s will as expressed in electoral outcomes, usually a majority, matters, but only within limits established by the Constitution.
The Electoral College does not “trump the popular vote”: It is based on it, at the state level. It is a balance of power mechanism that protects the relevance of state legislatures vs. the federal government. A national tally is only one way of counting the popular vote, and in a diverse nation it is absurd. Furthermore, an individual’s vote “counts” proportionally more when broken down into 51 distinct contests, rather than thrown into one giant pot of 160 million or so. I prefer the Electoral College, for these and other reasons.
Hamilton was right. “The voice of the people” as expressed in elections needs to be checked, not blindly followed. That’s the purpose of a republic whose elected representatives are themselves checked in their power by an individual rights-protecting constitution.
Related Reading:
Senator Mike Lee is Right: America ‘is not a Democracy’
The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery
Slavery was in fact defended by pro-slavery Confederate intellectuals like George Fitzhugh on socialist grounds.
America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson
A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War by Harry V. Jaffa
Mesmerized by Elections, the NJ Star-Ledger Forgot that Tyranny is Tyranny
The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur
Constitutional Republicanism: A Counter-Argument to Barbara Rank’s Ode to Democracy
QUORA: ‘Why does the Electoral College of the United States of America exist?’
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