From Republic to Tyrannical Democracy?
By Carole Hornsby Haynes August 11, 2024 First published in American Thinker
America is in a crisis. From a Constitutional Republic and limited government founded on Judeo-Christian principles, America has now disintegrated into a state of chaos, violence, murder, corruption, indebtedness, and internal division that threatens to rip the nation asunder. Where does the blame lie?
A paper by the progressive Carnegie Endowment for International Peace asserts that the “world’s oldest democracy” is “in swift decline.” The authors contend that “political violence and spontaneous hate crimes that harm people” are committed mostly by those on the right while the vast majority of Black Lives Matter protests have been “peaceful,” except for a few that resulted in the most costly insurance payouts in modern history.
Al Jazeera, the Qatar media network, claims that Republicans “violate fundamental principles upon which American democracy was founded” as they push “American democracy to its breaking point.”
The progressive MSNBC employs fear tactics in claiming that some Republicans want people to believe the country is actually a republic rather than a democracy because they want to strip power from voters in the presidential election and hand it to state legislatures. They fail to address that the progressive socialist left wants to abolish the electoral college so that a national election will be decided by a few large states, such as far left California, at the expense of voters in small states.
For decades the progressive socialist left has worked feverishly, especially in main stream media and education, to change the narrative about our founding principles and form of government. They have been highly successful. A 2019 survey by the non-profit Institute for Citizens & Scholars found that only four out of 10 Americans could pass the citizenship test. In 2023, NAEP results for eighth graders reported that only 13 percent were proficient in U.S. history and 22 percent proficient in civics.
Students are not taught that our Founding Fathers chose a republic (United States Constitution, Art. 4 Sec. 4 Par. 1) rather than a democracy because they feared “mobocracy” inherent in a pure democracy where the majority feeling of the moment rules. By contrast, a republic is governed by rule of law where the general population elects representatives who pass laws -- rule of law.
The founders’ fears about the dangers of a pure democracy were often addressed in their writings.
“In democracy . . . there are commonly tumults and disorders. . . .Therefore a pure democracy is generally a very bad government. It is often the most tyrannical government on earth.” (Noah Webster)
“....experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and shortlived.” (John Quincy Adams)
“It may generally be remarked that the more a government resembles a pure Democracy the more they abound with disorder and confusion.” (Zephaniah Swift, Author of America’s First Legal Text)
“Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state, it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage.” (John Witherspoon, Signer of the Declaration)
In his essay, “America: Republic or Democracy,” radical Green Party activist William P. Meyers labels the Founding Fathers “predatory elitists” who founded the U.S. as a republic for their own selfish gain. Meyers contends that “national government was seen by George Washington and company, not as a method of extending freedom and the right to vote, but as a way of keeping control in the hands of rich.”
Employing brain twisting descriptions, Meyers pirouettes around the definitions of democracy, representative democracy, and democratic republic so as to thoroughly confound his audience. He offers the “evil empire” of the former USSR as an example of a republic because the lawmakers were elected, albeit by the Communist Party.
He assures his readers, however, that for two centuries Americans have been working to undo the work of the “selfish” Founders’ by transforming their republic to a democracy.
In addition to infiltrating public education, this erosion to our Constitutional rights has been accomplished through federal legislation, including Constitutional amendments, and federal judicial decisions that have taken America down the road toward a pure democracy with control by an elite few.
Using a Living Constitution approach, activist federal judges create policy to reflect modern needs through their own rewritten version of the Constitution. These unelected and unaccountable judges are committing impeachable offenses in their failing to uphold the Constitution.
Unstated by socialists and unrecognized by many Americans is the fact that, under a Living Constitution, an unaccountable elite few are empowered to make decisions at their whim. Rule of law ceases to exist and the rights of the individual are invariably trampled.
As the years pass and we drift further from our original Constitution, we witness daily the chaos, instability, and tyranny our Founders feared if we dissolved into a democracy.
Just as many Americans have failed to recognize the ramifications of Barack Hussein Obama’s promise of a “transformation” of America, they also have failed to understand how and why we have strayed far afield from those principles that made us the greatest nation on earth.
Jeffrey Rosen, CBS News constitutional law expert, acting attorney general under Trump, and president of National Constitution Center said, "What worries me the most about constitutional ignorance is the same worry that the framers had….That without constitutional education, the Republic will collapse."
James McHenry, a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention, recorded a story that claims Mrs. Elizabeth Powel of Philadelphis asked Benjamin Franklin whether the new government would be a monarchy or a republic. “A republic if you can keep it,” Franklin is purported to have replied.
If we are able to keep our republic, it will require educating all Americans about the facts of our founding principles and form of government. A good start would be to throw out race-based Marxist, education-lite Social Studies and return to indoctrination-free classical education with American history and civics.