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A democratic government is that system of government under which those ruled determine by vote the exercise of the legislative and executive power and the selection of supreme executives and other government personnel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is also sometimes known as vox populi \u2014 <\/em>a Latin term meaning \u201cvoice of the people\u201d \u2014 and the winner is of course determined by majority rule. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Majority rule is stupendously dangerous. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If, for example, a majority votes that the exercise of power remove the rights of a minority \u2014 let us say, for the purpose of illustration, the rights of women or the rights of gay men or the rights of jewish people \u2014 there is now\u00a0nothing<\/em>\u00a0to protect that minority\u2019s rights, which in reality are inalienable (they\u2019re either recognized or not \u2014 and if they\u2019re not, it is an act of injustice).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Please allow that to sink it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Democracy has become a junk work — a throwaway word — a word everybody uses (and uses, moreover, always in the context of a good and virtuous thing) but which virtually no one understands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is precisely why the United States is fundamentally, as Benjamin Franklin put it, \u201ca Constitutional Republic\u201d: because your life and your property are yours absolutely. They are not in any way, at any time, subject to vote, nor should they be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Constitutional theoreticians and philosophical architects didn\u2019t have any great love for democracy, and they certainly didn\u2019t believe in unlimited majority rule on primary issues, as I will show in a moment, and the reason they didn\u2019t is that they didn\u2019t believe that fundamental rights should be at the mercy of the majority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, democracy was also called by some among them \u201cthe tyranny of the majority.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c[Under democracy] there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And John Adams, a \u201cpassionately outspoken enemy of slavery,\u201d as he was described, accurately recognized that democracies \u201cmerely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect preexisting rights.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The immortal Benjamin Franklin, who was president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, petitioned the first United States Congress for the \u201cfull abolition of slavery, and every species of traffic in slavery\u201d because by right \u201cno human is by nature the property of another.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thomas Jefferson himself wrote into the Declaration of Independence<\/em> a serious and scrupulously reasoned denunciation of the slave trade, which was, however, edited out by congress. In 1784, Jefferson brought a bill before Congress which sought to prohibit slavery in all western territories, but this bill was voted down by a single vote. That\u2019s democracy at work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet there is<\/em> a certain sense in which the United States is both a democracy and a republic, and the component that makes it a partial democracy is the \u201cprocedural selection of personnel,\u201d which refers to electing the officials whose job it is to implement Constitutional principles. But the principles themselves\u2013 most fundamentally, the principle of rights \u2013 isn\u2019t ever, in theory, subject to vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neither was the selection of personnel ever meant to be the colossal issue that it\u2019s become today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that it has become so \u2013 when, for example, it is decided by vote if you may open your liquor store on Sunday, or when it is decided by vote if you can allow people to drink and smoke in your privately owned establishment \u2013 tells you how little our current politicians understand the nature of rights, and how far we\u2019ve come from the original concept. <\/p>\n\n\n\n More frighteningly, perhaps, it tells you how little the voting public understands it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Inalienable <\/em>means \u201cthat which cannot be taken away, transferred, or made alien\u201d \u2013 not by vote, not by force, not by anyone. It any one does so, it is wrong<\/em> \u2014 which is not just coincidentally here the opposite of right.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Right are inalienable in the following sense:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Persons unaccustomed to attach exact meanings to words will say that the fact that a man may be unjustly executed or imprisoned negates this proposition [of inalienable rights]. It does not. The right is with the victim nonetheless; and very literally it cannot be alienated, for alienated means passing into the possession of another. One man cannot enjoy either the life or liberty of another. If he kills ten men he will not thereby live ten lives or ten times as long; nor is he more free if he puts another man in prison. Rights are by definition inalienable: only privileges can be transferred. Even the right to own property cannot be alienated or transferred, though a given item of property can be. If one man\u2019s rights are infringed, no other man obtains them; on the contrary, all men are thereby threatened with a similar injury<\/em> (Isabel Paterson, God of the Machine,<\/em> 1943).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The erosion of the critical sense \u2014 which largely makes possible the widespread mischaracterization of democracy and rights \u2014 is a serious threat to civilization. That the vote has become a weapon of destruction testifies to this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though a tyrant may temporarily rule through a minority if this minority holds superior arms and methods of force over the majority, in the long run a minority cannot keep the majority in subservience. The oppressed will rise up in rebellion and cast off the yoke of tyranny. Any system of government that would endure must therefore construct itself upon a system of ideas accepted by the majority.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n And that is just one of the many dangers of democracy \u2014 i.e vox-populi, i.e. \u201cthe tyranny of the majority,\u201d as it has been accurately described: the inalienable rights of the individual are not inalienable after all but can simply be voted away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hitler and Mussolini were well-liked by the majority of their people, for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No matter how silly and nonsensical you or I may find a given idea or ideology, so long as you and I are silent and unwilling (or unable) to counter these ideas and ideologies \u2014 relentlessly, thoroughly, forcefully, intellectually counter and refute them \u2014 we all remain vulnerable to the spread of these ideologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Call forth the colossal power of your critical faculty and unleash the full force of your thinking, reasoning, independent mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A democratic government is that system of government under which those ruled determine by vote the exercise of the legislative and executive power and the selection of supreme executives and other government personnel. This is also sometimes known as vox populi \u2014 a Latin term meaning \u201cvoice of the people\u201d \u2014 and the winner is of course … <\/p>\n