Al Sharpton strikes again. First he thinks that the revolutionaries who founded our republic would never overthrow a government (see below). Now he is incredulous that somebody would say that the US is not a democracy. There is an argument to be had here. But Sharpton isn’t up to it. Why is Al Sharpton on TV? He’s a street preacher. A charlatan. A confirmed anti-intellectual type. A blow hard. How did he get to this place? Because MSNBC appreciates grifters and race hustlers, that’s how. You’d think, though, they’d want to protect their reputation (they must believe they have one).
Congressman Doug Collins is right. The founding fathers of the United States did establish a republic, not a democracy. The author of our constitution, James Madison, is adamant on that point. He condemns democracy in the Federalist Papers. It’s true that the terms “republic” and “democracy” are often used interchangeably, and moreover that a republic can have democratic elements, but these terms refer to distinct forms of government. In a constitutional republic, the government’s authority is derived from the people and representatives are chosen to make decisions on their behalf, but the government is vested in a territory and a creed. In the United States, citizens elect representatives who make and enforce laws. A democracy, in contrast, is a system of government in which the power is vested in the people. Citizens participate in decision-making, often through votes on laws and policies. A democracy risks majority rule without a strong system of checks and balances—and then it becomes a republic.
In a recent article on Freedom and Reason, America is a Republic (It is also a Democracy), I referred to this debate as something of a fake issue. You can see my blog for details. There I discuss Madison’s argument. Briefly here, in Federalist Paper No. 10, Madison discusses the dangers of factions and how they could threaten the stability of a government. He argues that pure democracies, where all citizens directly participate in decision-making, are susceptible to the harmful effects of factions. Madison defines factions as groups of citizens united by a common interest, often adverse to the rights of other citizens or the interests of the community as a whole. “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
The founding fathers established a system that blended elements of both a republic and a democracy. While citizens have the power to elect their representatives, the structure of the government includes checks and balances among the branches (executive, legislative, and judicial) to prevent any one group or the people from becoming too powerful. This intricate system was designed to protect individual rights and promote stability and to thwart majoritarianism.
To understand what “the people” means in this formulation think individual not masses. This is indeed, as Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, a government of the people, by the people, for the people. He also said this is a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The individual is the people. Though it says the people, the Second Amendment articulates an individual right to keep and bear arms. When the First Amendment guarantees the right of the people peaceably to assemble, it means to guarantee the individual his right to join his voice with others to express conscience and opinion in unison. We are not a society of tribes (factions) or of a mass, but a society of individuals, each autonomous and rational—and equal in our standing before the law and in principle. This is the fundamental thing the identitarians don’t understand. They seek mob rule. This they understand democracy to be. And so we must remind those who hear that we are a republic, and diminish those who don’t.
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