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Feb. 28, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:21
DEMOCRACY OR REPUBLIC? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep279
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I'm going to do a special episode today on the question of, is the United States a democracy or a republic?
I'm going to try to consider that question sort of in depth.
Some of the questions I'll explore along the way, why do majorities have a right to rule?
What distinguishes ancient from modern democracy?
Why English democracy, the democracy we kind of inherited from England, gave virtually unlimited power to Parliament.
How Madison and the founders dealt with the problem of tyranny of the majority.
And I'll conclude by summarizing what kind of society America was designed to be.
And I'm going to sort of pose the conflict of visions, the two rival ways whose resolution will determine our country's future.
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Is America a democracy or are we a republic?
This is a question that I've I've been hearing about, really, for many years.
And sometimes I'll also speak of American democracy.
And inevitably, I'll get through the website or, you know, I like your podcast and all, but I just want to tell you, America's not a democracy.
We're a republic.
And this has sort of got me thinking, not only...
Whether that's correct, whether this is a meaningful distinction, we're going to talk about this in some depth today, but why people say that?
What are they trying to get at?
What are they trying to say we are not in order to emphasize what we are?
Now, the two terms, democracy and republic, have Related, but different meanings.
Now, I should say at the outset that both terms are so routinely abused, not just in their kind of sloppy usage in the United States or in the West, but all kinds of tyrannical regimes will appropriate the title of democracy, the title of republic.
So think, for example, about...
I remember from the 1970s when Pinochet was the dictator of Chile.
He would be like... I'm the president of the Republic of Chile.
Well, Chile wasn't a republic in any meaningful sense, but Pinochet wanted to make it seem like he was a man of the people.
And that's really what republic means, a government that is accountable to and for, operating in a sense in the interest and the welfare of Chile.
Think of the North Korea.
It's the Republic of Korea.
Wait, it's not a real republic.
But it's kind of interesting that these tyrannical societies feel a kind of moral pressure to claim that they are acting on behalf of the people.
I would think, you know, think of aristocrats and tyrants of the old days.
They were like, the people stink.
We don't care about the people.
The people are idiots. So they didn't find it important.
Think of the tyrants and the monarchs who claimed a mantle from God.
Well, God has put me here.
What do I care about the roughneck people?
I'm here to subjugate them.
They deserve to be subjugated.
But not today. Today, even tyrannical regimes.
In the Soviet Union, in the Soviet Empire, you had the German Democratic Republic.
Not a democracy in any meaningful sense.
No accountability to the people.
Taking orders straight from Moscow, run by a tyrant.
But nevertheless, the GDR. And so this is the abuse of these terms.
But now let's come to their actual use and their actual meaning.
Well, as I'm actually giving a list of these tyrannies, I'm also thinking of the very peculiar democracy that we have right now in Iran.
Now, Iran, I would say, is a kind of, we'd have to call it a partial democracy.
Why? Because they do have elections, and the elections by and large are free.
But the candidates are pre-selected.
There's a kind of ruling council of mullahs, a kind of grand council, and they go, yeah, you can be a candidate.
No, no, no, no, you can't be a candidate.
So the candidates are all from the approved list.
In that sense, you cannot talk about an open and free election because they rig it at the candidate level.
And also, you're dealing here with a kind of a theocracy.
And by that, I mean that the Constitution is, in a sense, taken straight out of the Quran.
The Quran is the Constitution, and sort of holy law, Sharia, becomes the law of the land.
So... These are the kind of anomalies around the world.
But let's turn now to democracy itself and let's turn to the idea of a republic and try to gauge what these terms actually mean.
Now, the term republic is a broader...
And I would have to say a somewhat looser term than democracy.
Why? Because a republic merely means a government that is accountable to the people.
But accountable to the people in what precise way?
The answer is in a variety of ways.
And throughout history, both in the ancient world and the modern world, there have been a wide range of republics.
Let's look for a moment At the old Roman Republic, which was the closest thing to a republic in the ancient world.
Now, the Roman Republic was installed when the Romans pushed out the Tarquin kings.
These are foreign kings who came from outside of Rome.
And by expelling the Tarquans, the Romans established a republic.
But what did it mean to have a republic?
Did it mean that they would have, let's say, elections?
Were the Roman senators in the days of Cicero chosen by the people?
No. The Senate was largely hereditary.
Hereditary. The Senate was based upon ancient and noble families.
In many cases, there were military families that came into the Senate as a result of having demonstrated valor on the battlefield.
In any case, the Senate was its own power, separate from the people.
And in fact, sometimes it was the case that the Roman Emperor Whether it be Julius Caesar or later, of course, Augustus Caesar.
In Julius Caesar's time, Caesar made himself the ally of the people against the Senate.
So the Senate couldn't say to Caesar, hey, we represent the people, because Caesar would say, the people are actually on my side.
And so Caesarism is a kind of alliance between the ordinary people and Caesar against the Senate.
So even though the Senate represented sort of the rule of law, laws that should apply equally to everybody, nevertheless, the military heroism of the Caesar was more appealing to the people in the case of Rome.
Caesar was more a man of the people, even though he was never elected by the people.
But he had the support of the people.
So this is the ancient Roman Republic.
And let's now talk for a moment about...
Ancient democracy.
Because ancient democracy was direct democracy.
And by direct democracy, I mean there was no question of electing other people to make decisions in your place or in your stead.
Rather, you, the citizen, the free citizen, decided yourself.
Now, citizenship was quite limited in ancient Athens.
Out of a population of, what, 40 or 45,000, about 12,000 citizens.
12,000 people could vote.
You had to be male. You had to be a property owner.
So there were all these conditions.
And this was a time when Athens had slavery.
Slaves obviously couldn't vote.
Women couldn't vote. And so the franchise was limited.
But nevertheless, when they had to make a decision, the idea was, hey, listen, we're going to put out the word.
Everybody show up in the public square.
It was called the Agora. We'll then present a question.
We will debate it and debate it.
Think about it. No microphones, but orators stand up and speak, make arguments on both sides.
You make a decision. And then you decide if Athens is going to go to war with Sparta.
You decide if you're going to have higher taxes.
These decisions are made directly by the people themselves.
And in the ancient world, that was what was known as democracy.
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I talked in the last segment about the distinction between a republic and a democracy in the ancient world, in which republics and democracies were different than they are now.
And we have to realize that in the ancient world, both Republics and democracies were highly controversial and were not seen by the leading thinkers in those times as being the best form of government.
On the contrary, Plato argues emphatically that democracy is a bad form of government.
Part of his reason is that government, like everything else, he thinks, requires some sort of an expertise.
And so, for example, if you are A captain of a ship, you have expertise in guiding a ship.
And you would never dream of saying to the passengers, hey, listen, guys, there's a storm coming up.
I don't know what to do.
Why don't we consult all of you?
And you tell me what to do, and I'll do that.
No, the captain wouldn't dream of doing that.
Why? Because the ordinary guy sitting and, you know, eating a sandwich has no idea what to do.
He has no expertise in this area.
And so Plato's point is that if you need expertise to be a farmer and you need expertise to be a soldier and you need expertise to be a ship captain, why wouldn't you need some expertise to run the ship of state?
Of course you do. And so, says Plato, it is the wise, which for Plato are the philosophers, who have the best understanding of human nature, the best understanding of society, of the polis, and therefore they should be the ones that rule the state.
So this is the case against democracy.
And if you think about it, that's a case that would, to some degree, work against any Republican form of government either.
Why? Because any Republican form of government that operates, for example, under rule of law would be vulnerable to the same objection.
Why would you have rule of law when you could have wise people who could adapt every rule to a given situation?
In other words, rule of law applies a kind of standard maxim to everybody, whereas a truly wise government, I think Plato would take this view, would decide every case on the merits.
You don't have to say, listen, let's have a 65 mile an hour speed limit, because some people can drive safely at 80.
Other people are unsafe at 40.
So, a discretionary rule that is aimed at a given situation and a given person is better, in theory.
Now, Aristotle, writing a kind of critique of Plato, largely agrees with Plato that the wise should rule, but nevertheless argues, I think very profoundly, that the wisdom of the wise must be vindicated by the consent of Of the unwise.
Or to put it differently, the rule of the wise must be modified by the consent of the governed.
And Aristotle is now introducing an important idea, which is that you might be ruling to make society better.
You might say that you're doing things for my benefit, but...
What if I don't agree?
I don't see it that way.
So Aristotle says, in a good society, the wise are ruling, but the unwise, or let's just call it the common man, must be able to see that, yeah, you know, you're making decisions, but they're for my good, too.
So the unwise have to kind of sign up For this type of rule.
Otherwise, you have a polarization, as we do to some degree in our society now, where people claim to be acting as wise.
These are the progressives.
We're making wise decisions for everybody's good.
But everyone else goes, we don't really see it that way.
My life is worse.
I can't get a job. I'm paying more.
I'm not as safe in the streets.
So my country is not as safe.
So I don't believe you.
When you say that you're acting in my interest.
So this concept of the consent of the governed leads Aristotle to the idea that the best form of government is not a mere monarchy and is not a mere aristocracy and it's not democracy either.
It's what Aristotle calls a mixed regime.
And what Aristotle means by a mixed regime is that there are good elements in monarchy.
There are certain things where one guy needs to decide.
Sometimes there's an emergency decision and you can't really have, you know, a discourse about it and multiple points of view.
Somebody's got to go, we've got to do this now.
And that's the case for one-man rule.
And there are times when you want a kind of elite body of citizens to come together and make decisions, and so there's a certain benefit in having, Aristotle thinks, aristocratic virtues.
But all of that has to be modified by the consent of the governed.
So for Aristotle, a mixed regime that distributes power is one that is the best regime.
And I think we can see right here that already we have the germ, and think about this, we're going all the way back to the 4th century BC, and already we have the germ of, I would say, the American system of government, which is, by the way, a mixed regime.
And by mixed regime, I mean it has, think of it this way.
Do we have elements of monarchy?
We do. It's called the presidency.
The president can take unilaterally actions, particularly in the area of foreign policy, but also in certain other demarcated areas, executive authority, the idea of issuing an executive order, and also making emergency provisions here and there.
The president can act by himself.
In that sense, he is the modern equivalent of a sort of one-man rule of ancient monarchy.
Then we have bodies that have a certain tenure, like the Senate.
That's the closest thing, and even the Supreme Court, to aristocracy.
In the Supreme Court, you have, what, nine people?
And they serve for life, so it's not hereditary, but you serve for your entire life.
You can't really be kicked out.
You have independence. You're not really accountable to any of the other branches of government, at least not directly.
And you have the power to check those branches.
And so it's sort of like a little bit of a rule of the wise.
And the Senate can be seen also as being certainly more aristocratic in that sense than the House.
And then finally, we have democracy.
We have the rule of the people as reflected not only through elections, but the people are regularly consulted.
Opinion polls. Biden is very unpopular.
That's the American people don't like what he's doing so far.
And so even though the will of the people matters at election time, It is nevertheless probed and measured, dissected, consulted throughout the tenure of government itself.
And so we have in America here a modern form of Aristotle's old mixed regime.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. The difference between ancient democracy and modern democracy is is that ancient democracy was direct democracy.
The people rule themselves.
Whereas modern democracy is representative democracy.
The people don't rule.
We don't rule directly.
We don't make direct decisions.
We choose other people to rule in our place.
And so the involvement of the citizens becomes rather one in deciding who their leaders and rulers will be.
Now, obviously, it's really important that that process have a certain basic integrity.
And when that integrity breaks down, the whole democratic process is thrown into question.
And this is a topic I'll address in my upcoming movie, 2,000 Mules.
But modern democracy is a democracy in which citizens exercise power periodically, not constantly, but at election time.
But it does raise the question that if you're going to have modern democracy based upon a principle of majority rule, you have majority parties and they get control of the government.
You have the candidate who gets the majority or an electoral majority who nevertheless becomes the president and becomes the ruler of the country.
And the question becomes, why should majorities rule?
It's Something we're so used to believing should be the case that we don't often ask, well, why?
Let's say, for example, there are ten of us and we're all going, we're trying to decide which movie to go to, and six people say, let's go see a comedy, and four of us go, well, no, we'd rather go see a thriller.
Now, why should the view of the six prevail?
Who's to say that's the best decision?
Yeah, there's six, but we're four.
I guess in normal circumstances, we'd be like, well, six of you go see the comedy.
Four of us will go watch the thriller.
But of course, in a society, in a country, and we're using these ten people as a miniature of a society, you can't do that.
Because if you did that all the time, the society would just keep fracturing and breaking apart.
You six people go, do your thing.
We'll do our thing. And when we disagree the next time, you know, there are only four of us now left.
Three go one way. One goes the other way.
And so this becomes a principle of disintegration that obviously can't work.
So in trying to make a society whole together, How do you decide?
Now, in the ancient world, there was the tribal system, and the tribal system was based upon consensus.
Consensus is simply the idea that everybody has to agree, and you keep talking, you keep arguing, until you come to kind of complete agreement.
But again, that's not viable in a large society because you're not going to get everyone to agree.
It's hard to get everyone to agree on anything, let alone on everything or every major issue.
And so what you have is, on given issues, you have majorities.
And you have minorities.
And so your options are really only two.
Should the majority rule?
Or should the minority rule?
I think we would agree that for the minority in a society to be ruling over the majority does represent a certain type of tyranny.
It is the smaller faction of society imposing its will on the larger faction.
So it seems that majority rule is the lesser evil of those two options.
But... And here's the key point.
The early modern philosophers who defended representative democracy and majority rule were very clear that the majority derives its mandate, if you will, to rule on behalf of the whole.
And what that means is that even though the majority has kind of one view of things and the minority may have a different view of things, The majority shouldn't merely be a large faction that promotes its own interests over the minority, but the majority should, although legitimately ruling, take the minority's interests and values and wishes into account in making decisions.
In other words, the majority becomes the, Madison's words were, plenary substitute for the whole.
And I think this is very important today because in a fractured America, we're seeing so little of this.
You have a Biden administration.
They're like, this is where we want to go.
And frankly, not only do we not care what the rest of you think, but we view you as enemies of the state.
We're going to try to run you over.
We're happy to ruin your life if we can.
We're going to try to put you out of commission.
We're going to try to make life more difficult for you and easier for our team.
And nothing could be more alien than To the original spirit of majority rule, which is that the majority leads the team, but it's not the majority team running roughshod over the minority.
it's the majority acting on behalf of the whole team.
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The American system of government is unique in many respects.
The founders thought of it as a novus ordo seclorum, a new order for the ages.
But while being unique in some respects, it is also continuous to a degree inherited from the system of government in England, in Great Britain.
But when we look at Great Britain, we see that it has a different form of democracy than we do.
We have constitutional democracy.
I don't know if you know, but Great Britain does not have a constitution.
There's no constitution.
We have a so-called presidential system of government, and they have a parliamentary system of government.
Now, India, in fact, where I grew up, also has a parliamentary system, very much modeled on the English system.
And one key difference, by the way, between the English system and the American system is that in the English system, you run for office as a member of a party.
And so, for example, Margaret Thatcher or Boris Johnson, they're running as the leader of the Tory party.
And then you have another guy who's running as the leader of the Labour Party.
And whichever party wins, that party's man...
A woman becomes the leader, becomes the prime minister.
And in that sense, you may say that the prime minister is coming out of the legislative branch because the legislative branch is the party that has been chosen by the people to rule or to legislate, to make laws.
Interestingly, if you're a leader of one party, let's say you're Margaret Thatcher and you're a Tory, and you're the leader of the Tory party, and there's a fight within the Tory party, and you're challenged by other Tory members, and the Tories take a vote and decide, we'd rather have a different leader, you're out as Prime Minister.
Now, notice that doesn't happen in America.
The Democrats in the House or Senate can't get together and say, listen, we no longer want Joe Biden.
Let's get rid of him. And Biden's out.
No, Biden's not out.
Why? Because Biden is independently elected as the president directly by the people, or at least so the story goes.
And the point being that when you're elected in America by the people as the president, you have independent authority.
You're not, your position is not somehow obligated to...
When we also look at England, we notice that they have some very interesting features that we don't have here.
First of all, they have a monarchy.
They have a queen.
And they might have a king.
So right there you see that Europe has preserved, at least in form, cosmetically, a vestige of the old monarchy.
Whereas in America, from the beginning, it's like, we'll have none of that.
In fact, we will not have those titles.
Not only no monarchs, but no dukes and no earls and no counts.
All of that is put away as the kind of bric-a-brac of ancient and decayed European civilization.
But the English have it. Something else that the English have, and again it's very watered down from its old form, There used to be a principle in Europe, inherited from the peace of Westphalia, that the religion of the king is the religion of the whole country.
So if the king is Catholic, the whole country is Catholic.
If the king is Protestant, the whole country is Protestant.
There's no religious freedom in that sense.
You have the freedom to follow the same religion as your monarch.
That's it. Now, England doesn't have that anymore, but they do have, well, something that's not allowed in America, religious establishment.
And what does that mean? That means that they do have an official church, and it's the Anglican Church.
That is the church of the state.
So, no separation of church and state, but rather you have a state church.
Now, Do you have religious freedom in England?
Yes, you do. So you can be a Catholic and you can certainly be a Hindu or a Muslim.
So to that degree, there's toleration, there's religious freedom, but religious freedom coexisting within a structure of religious religion.
But the most significant thing about English democracy, and this is really a key difference with America that I want to develop, is that Parliament is supreme.
Parliament is, you may say, the final authority.
There's no such thing as an unconstitutional act of Parliament.
Well, in part because there's no such thing as a constitution.
So, do you have rights?
Yes, you do. The rights of the English come under what is called the common law.
And what's the common law?
It's kind of like established practice.
We've always done it that way.
Yeah, if some guy goes into an open field and there's nobody there, nobody really owns it, and he basically puts up a fence and starts growing some crops, that field kind of belongs to him.
Why? Not because he has a property right per se, but rather it's a right that's kind of acknowledged through the centuries.
This is how the farms in England got set up.
How did the original farmer get this land?
Well, he's the first guy who tilled it.
And so through English common law, through established precedent, and through earlier cases that have adjudicated the same kind of thing, you get your rights from there.
But there's certainly no Bill of Rights.
There's no First Amendment and Second Amendment and Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure.
You have the common law.
And outside of the common law, Parliament can make law.
And can make law in virtually an uncontrolled or virtually uncontrolled fashion.
And so, what you basically have in England is this.
The idea is that English democracy emerged through conflicts between the king.
And the people.
The people is represented by parliament.
And now in the original conflicts, the king and the parliament were lawless on both sides.
If you go back to the English Civil War, you have Charles I, who basically operates like a king, whatever I say is the law.
But Parliament was also operating lawlessly.
In fact, when they charged Charles I with all kinds of offenses, these were made-up offenses.
There were no laws that he had violated per se.
It was like, we're going to make laws right now and then declare that you violated them.
And so you essentially had the English Civil War, lawlessness on both sides, Parliament wins.
And through a complex of British history, the point I want to get at is that the emergence of democracy in England is a victory of the people, the majority, operating through Parliament over the monarchy.
And so tyranny in England is identified with monarchy.
That guy's a tyrant. One man is ruling the whole country.
And if you have parliament, well, that's the people.
How can that be tyrannical?
The people are ruling. That's a good thing, isn't it?
Well, the American founders did not think so.
And in the next segment, I want to develop the idea, remarkable idea, in America that tyranny doesn't have to come from a king.
It doesn't have to come from an aristocracy.
Tyranny can also come, incredibly, from the people themselves.
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I mentioned in the last segment that democracy in England...
It places all its confidence and all its power in Parliament.
Parliament is the ultimate authority.
Parliament can decide.
But although we have a legislative branch in America, we have the House, we have the Senate, Congress does not have that kind of virtually unchecked power.
And there are many issues on which Congress cannot decide.
And so, for example, Congress cannot decide to take away your free speech.
Congress does not have the power to decide that you don't have equal rights under the law.
In fact, Congress cannot decide that all men are not treated equal.
Now, why not? Why can't Congress pass those kinds of laws?
Well, the answer is that in the American system of government, Congress is itself under other types of authority that have their own jurisdiction, their own legitimacy, their own domain, and in some cases, namely the Constitution, supersede anything that Congress decides.
So Congress can decide nothing that goes against the Constitution.
In fact, there's a whole body, as we know, the Supreme Court, whose job it is to tell Congress when Congress is overstepping its bounds and encroaching or undermining the Constitution in any way.
So the Constitution, you might say, is a super law.
And if you ask yourself, where does the Constitution kind of come from?
The answer is the Constitution is the kind of original compact that establishes America, that is a kind of founding charter that has an authority that Americans in any particular generation cannot override or cannot override except in very extreme cases.
So there is a way to amend the Constitution.
It's very hard to do.
You need supermajorities in the House, supermajorities in the Senate.
You need the presidency.
You then need state ratification.
So it's deliberately very hard to change.
You can change it, but it almost requires a virtual consensus of the American people that, yeah, we got to add this in there.
But otherwise, the Constitution sort of presides over America.
But notice that we don't vote on the Constitution.
The Constitution, we don't control the Constitution.
In that sense, it constitutes or makes the kind of society that it is.
Now, why do we have all this?
Why do we have a Constitution? Why do we create a super law?
Why do we empower courts who are unelected?
To have this kind of power.
Well, the reason is really simple, and that is that the founders believed, and Madison is perhaps the father of the Constitution, so I use Madison, but I'm only naming Madison as a kind of stand-in for the founders.
Pretty much all the founders had this view.
And the view is this.
That yes, if one man lords it over everybody else, that is the tyranny of the one.
If ten people or a small gang does the same thing, that's the tyranny of the few, oligarchy.
But if the majority lords it over the minority and oppresses the minority and takes away the rights of the minority, then we have tyranny of the majority.
And this tyranny is no less objectionable than the other forms of tyranny.
Maybe it affects fewer people because the king is oppressing everybody, but the majority is only oppressing 49% or 41% of the population, but that's still a big chunk of the population.
And the premise of the American founding is that there are certain things, certain rights that we have as individuals.
And these rights do not come from the state.
We have them by virtue of being human.
This is the point of all men are created equal.
We're made in such a way that being human, which is to say not being animals, horses, for example, don't have a right not to be...
To be ridden, not to be saddled, not to be controlled by man.
It is the nature of a horse that they can be and are dominated by human beings.
But human beings don't have that kind of right to dominate each other.
And so our individual rights are to this degree.
And the founders use this very interesting word.
We sometimes say inalienable.
I think the founders said unalienable.
And unalienable means that these rights are, well, you can't give them away, even if you want to.
Even if you want to, you can't say, listen, I'm going to be your slave for life.
From now on, I'm your slave.
I'm going to sell myself into slavery for 50 cents.
You can't do it. You're not allowed to do it.
Why? Because your rights are not up for being traded away even by you.
So when you start with this premise of inviolable rights in the view of the founders, and specifically Madison, it follows that governments are established, but established for what purpose?
Well, they're established for the purpose of protecting these rights.
And so whether it's a minority or the majority, that's simply an argument about which group is going to be doing the protecting.
But the rights themselves are not up for adjudication.
Now, I say all this recognizing that there's been so much of a violation of these principles, so much of a trampling on these principles, really by the left, and in the next segment, I'll talk a little bit more about that and how that came about.
But what I'm getting at is that the founders, I think, were not hung up, you might say, between are we a democracy or are we a republic.
What the founders would say, I think, is that we are a constitutional democracy, which is to say we're a democracy, but we're a democracy under a constitution.
We're a democracy that does permit and affirm majority rule, but only majority rule that is consistent with the protection of minority rights.
Yes, we're a democracy in which we have elected leaders and they have power, but that power is circumscribed and limited.
By what? By the Constitution.
The Constitution says that the government shall do this and the government shall do that.
And beyond that, the Constitution doesn't give the government any other kind of power.
Now again, I'm talking about the way the constitutional architecture or arrangement of how the country was set up.
We now have to consider how this delicate and, I would say, beautifully constructed arrangement was desecrated, pushed to the side, and abridged By a movement that developed in the early 20th century, a movement called progressivism.
This is now the founding movement of the Democratic.
This is the movement that's taken over the Democratic Party.
And the essence of progressivism is to subvert not only the Republican side of government, but also the Democratic.
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Feel the difference. I want to consider why so many conservatives and Republicans are insistent that a distinction be maintained between democracy on the one hand, and they're sort of like, we're not a democracy, and a republic on the other.
Why is that important?
And I think here's why it is.
We have, in this country, In our founding structure.
And our founding structure was modified, by the way, in important ways by the Civil War.
The Civil War is almost an illustration of the classic principles of American democracy.
Think about it this way. When Madison talked about tyranny of the majority, in a sense he could be describing the southern states Prior to the Civil War, because the southern states were democratic, they voted, but the majority, which happened to be a white majority, Was voting to take away, to subtract, to not recognize the rights of the slaves.
The slaves were declared to be subordinate human beings and the majority said, we have the right to do with you whatever we want.
We can treat you as merchandise.
We can buy and sell you.
You have no rights because we, the majority, have voted and we decree that you are lesser than us.
And so right here you can almost see a classic, dramatic illustration of tyranny of the majority.
And a denial, this was Lincoln's point, of the concept, the founding concept that all men are created equal.
Interestingly, by the way, the Civil War, too, was a referendum on democracy.
And I say that because, ultimately, some people say, well, was the Civil War really fought over slavery?
Was it really something else?
Well, an easy way to think about it is that the immediate precipitating cause of the Civil War, the thing that got it started, was something really simple.
One guy, Lincoln, won a free election.
The other side, by the way, didn't deny it.
This was not a case where you had, you know, I don't think he really won fair and square.
No, the southern states conceded.
Yeah, Lincoln won. Even though, by the way, Lincoln didn't even appear on the ballot in 10 of the southern states.
Nevertheless, he did win an electoral majority, a pretty decisive one, narrow but clear.
And the Southern states said, Democratic states, by the way, said, in effect, we refuse to accept the outcome.
In other words, we reject the rules of the game.
Interestingly, the argument for the South was also put in Democratic terms, not the democracy of the election itself of 1860, which the South would have to say we lost.
But the Southern states said, well, listen, we're appealing to a different type of democracy.
You know, we join this union freely, but we were never told then that we could never leave.
And so if we, a part, don't like what the whole is doing or the larger part is doing, we have every right to march off and create our own society.
And interestingly, the South tried to create a society that was in many ways a mirror image.
If you read the Confederate Constitution...
It's an almost exact copy of the U.S. Constitution.
Of course, it deviates on the issue of slavery, but if you remove that one issue on everything else, it's almost like they took it word for word.
It's basically kind of a simple job, just copy everything and just remove a few of the sentences that deal with equality and that seem to outlaw slavery.
So, this was the experience.
But the Civil War and the amendments to the Constitution that came out of the Civil War, the 13th Amendment, 14th and 15th Amendments, the right to vote, all of those now become part of the Constitution itself.
And so you have this structure that then comes into the 20th century.
But in the 20th century, you have a movement called progressivism.
And progressivism, as it turns out, is a movement that views the founding itself, all of it, As backward.
All of it as belonging to a different time and place.
And progressivism takes its cues not from this or that aspect of the founding, but from the future.
This is why they call it progressivism.
It's progress. We're going someplace higher.
We're going to a taller peak than where we started.
And so we shouldn't be taking our cues from the lowland valleys.
We should be looking upward and let history...
Which is to say the forward movement of history dictate where we are going to go.
And if the people, by the way, don't want to go there, we've got to show them.
So in other words, consent becomes something that is not something to be deciphered from the people.
It's something to be manufactured.
Let's use the media. Let's educate the people to have the right feelings and the right desires.
And then let's have a kind of A group of experts.
And who better than, well, let's look around.
How about you? How about me?
We, the progressives ourselves, are going to be the managerial authority for the society guiding it to a kind of higher place.
So, suddenly what you see is that the founding architecture is dispensed with.
Even in the Civil War, it wasn't dispensed with.
In the Civil War, both sides argued that they were the true apostles, the true representatives of the Constitution.
But what you have with progressivism is the idea that the Constitution itself is archaic.
The whole concept of a living Constitution is another way of saying, listen, the Constitution by itself is dead.
It has to be animated and revived by the ongoing and changing mores, not of the people themselves because nobody takes a referendum to figure this out.
Nobody took a referendum on abortion and said, okay, now let's have Roe v.
Wade. The whole idea was enlightened judges will impose that on the people.
The people will get used to it.
And then it will become a moray.
It will then become embedded in the way that the people act and the way that people are.
So progressivism, it seems to me, represents an assault on both the Republican Constitution and the Democratic Constitution.
I want to sum up by saying that I don't think the real issue is a choice between the word Democratic or the word Republican.
We have a Republican form of government.
And in fact, famously, when Ben Franklin was asked, what kind of government have you given us?
He said, a republic, if you can keep it.
And what Franklin meant is that we have a system of government that is accountable to and for on behalf of the people.
Lincoln spoke later about a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.
And Lincoln, too, was placing himself very much in that founding tradition.
Now, that tradition does have democratic elements, and I think it's a mistake for us as Republicans, as conservatives, to deny that our structure is democratic in many ways.
It's just not democratic in all ways.
So it's kind of helpful to spell out what are the democratic and what are the undemocratic elements of our system of government.
So here are some democratic elements.
We have a president who is, or should be, elected by the people.
The people vote directly for the president, so that is clearly a democratic part of our system.
Senators are voted for by the people.
Representatives of the House are voted for by the people.
So these are all the elected figures in government, and it applies not only to the legislature, but also to We're good to go.
Now, let's turn to the undemocratic elements of our system of government.
We have a Supreme Court, unelected.
And the job of the Supreme Court is to protect the rights of the people, individual rights, against the legislature.
That's why we read the Bill of Rights.
Congress shall make no law.
Congress can't do this. Congress can't do that.
So, limitations on government and on the majority are...
The job of the courts to protect.
And then there's the Constitution.
The Constitution, too, is undemocratic in the sense that nobody votes on it.
We inherit it. It comes from a previous generation.
You can almost say that the Constitution is the democracy of the dead.
And by that I mean it's almost like you take voters from the beginning of society to now and give everybody a vote.
And if you give everybody a vote, the living and the dead, obviously the dead would outnumber the living.
And the Constitution is a kind of enduring pact through the ages that can only be changed, as I said, in a very difficult way.
The Senate is undemocratic in a sense, and by that I mean is that the Senate operates on a long leash.
While somebody who's in the House of Representatives, well, they got to run for election every two years, so you don't like him, you kick him out, bring another guy in, two years later kick that guy out.
The Senate has a longer duration, six years.
And also the Senate is undemocratic in the sense that we have equal weight, equal voting power for senators from large and small states.
So you have a state like Rhode Island, a very small state.
But it's got two senators, the same as California, which is a huge state.
So this may appear at the first glance to be some kind of archaic and sometimes liberals portrayed as archaic.
They'll say things like, well, why should the citizens of California have less power through the Senate than citizens of, say, Montana, Wyoming, or Rhode Island?
Well, for the founders originally, it was a matter of large states and small states and sort of making sure that the large states couldn't run roughshod over the small states.
But I would argue today the same rationale applies, but in a slightly modified way.
It's not so much today a difference between the large states and the small states.
But it's rather a difference between the big cities and the rural areas.
So if we had an America that was solely driven by population, the big cities ultimately would rule the entire country.
They would have complete sway over the lives of tens of millions of people who would in a sense be effectively disenfranchised.
Effectively disenfranchised because their voice, although it would count, wouldn't really matter in the end.
I think the reason that conservatives don't like the word democratic is because they see the Democrats trying to undo A lot of the features of our system that are intended to curtail mob rule or curtail the excesses of the majority.
So you hear, for example, leftists say, we don't need a Senate.
The Senate should be representative the same as the House.
Oh, we don't need the filibuster.
We don't want a minority blocking things like that.
Or even the Supreme Court.
Efforts to pack the court. The Supreme Court must reflect the will of the people.
The Supreme Court must look like America.
All of these are ways of the left targeting, if you will, the unrepresentative aspects of our government and trying to undo them as though somehow we need to go to some sort of unadulterated, pure democracy in which the majority has absolute rights over the minority.
The majority can do absolutely As in England, through Parliament, just pretty much whatever it wants.
That's not our system.
It's never been our system.
Our system has been to protect majority rule, but in the context of minority rights and individual rights, and that is the American exceptionalism.
That I think has become a magnet and a model for the world.
That's why we insist that we are a republic and not a democracy.
Not because we deny the democratic aspects of our society, but because we think that these other aspects have an important place as well.
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