Friday, November 11, 2011

Not a Democracy--a Republic!

Gary DeMar has a good post (HERE) on the nature of democracy and why it may not be what the Occupy Wall Street crowd thinks it is (or maybe they do know what it is but don't care).  DeMar begins his essay this way:
“We Are What Democracy Looks Like!” is a popular slogan and sign used by the Occupiers. If mob rule is the definition of democracy, then they are right. The thing of it is, America is not a democracy. Sure, there are democratic elements in our system of government, but Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution of the United States “guarantee[s] to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government,” not a democracy. One reason these young people may not be aware of these facts is that they may never had a course on the Constitution. 
He goes on to quote the following notable Americans as to their thoughts on "democracy":

John Winthrop (1588–1649), first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared direct democracy to be “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.”[1]
John Cotton (1584–1652), seventeenth-century Puritan minister in Massachusetts, wrote in 1636: “Democracy, I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed?”[2]
James Madison (1751–1836), recognized as the “father of the Constitution,” wrote that democracies are “spectacles of turbulence and contention.” Pure democracies are “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property. . . . In general [they] have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”[3]
John Adams, the second president of the United States, stated that “the voice of the people is ‘sometimes the voice of Mahomet, of Caesar, of Catiline, the Pope, and the Devil.’”[4]   (*All footnotes available at original article)