SOLO-International Op-Ed: Death to Democracy!

Lindsay Perigo
July 23, 2009

Several years ago, newly returned from America, I had occasion to say the following on my then-radio show:

"Actually, I have returned more convinced than ever that freedom's greatest modern-day enemy is democracy, the dreadful despotism of unbridled majority rule. In his new movie, The Patriot, Mel Gibson—playing a widowed South Carolina landowner, Benjamin Martin—explains his reluctance to take up arms against the British by asking, 'What is the difference between one tyrant 3000 miles away and 3000 tyrants one mile away?' As it happens, a new tyranny of numbers was never what the Founding Fathers intended, and Gibson does eventually join the War of Independence, but his question resonates today because a mobocracy is what America has become. What was it supposed to be? A country based on inalienable individual rights, governed, in the words of Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address, by 'a wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labour the bread it has earned.' With what horror would Jefferson view the elected regime of William Jefferson Clinton?!"

Today, watching the current President of the United States making his pitch for nationalized health care, it struck me anew what an enemy of freedom democracy is.

Mr. Obama listed the ballooning cost of Medicare and Medicaid as one rationale for yet greater intrusion by the government into the health industry. Of course, we've been hearing about "ballooning costs" ever since the socialist Lyndon Johnson set these schemes up in 1965. The truly American solution would be to abolish them. Simplicity itself. Except for one thing. Were he to do that, the President would be committing electoral suicide. Never mind that there's nothing in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution about an inalienable right to health care; never mind that such a "right" would be a flat contradiction of the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness which are mentioned; Americans would vote any President who dumped Medicare and Medicaid out of office ... if they didn't lynch him first. Of course, there's no danger of Obamadinejad doing such a thing—he was elected by these self-same Americans on a socialist platform and is not about to enact truly American solutions.

Winston Churchill once said that the best argument against democracy was a five-minute conversation with the average voter. These days, the average voter couldn't even sustain a five-minute conversation. Government education and the nihilistic culture it has engendered have combined to make the mob unprecedentedly stupid, not to mention sullenly dependent. But still they have the vote.

"Democracy," said Ben Franklin, "is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"

"We are a Republican Government," said Alexander Hamilton. "Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy. .... It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity."

"Democracies," said James Madison, "have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death."

"A democracy," said Thomas Jefferson, "is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."

Time was when those who put their lives on the line for liberty were instructed in the difference between it and democracy. Chinese-American writer Bevin Chu, in his article, Democracy, the Worst Form of Government Ever Tried [1] cites from a manual issued by the U.S. War department in 1928:

Democracy:

A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of "direct" expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic--negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether is be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Results in demogogism, license, agitation, discontent.

Republic:

Authority is derived through the election by the people of public officials best fitted to represent them. Attitude toward law is the administration of justice in accord with fixed principles and established evidence, with a strict regard to consequences. A greater number of citizens and extent of territory may be brought within its compass. Avoids the dangerous extreme of either tyranny or mobocracy. Results in statesmanship, liberty, reason, justice, contentment, and progress. Is the "standard form" of government throughout the world. A republic is a form of government under a constitution which provides for the election of:

(1) an executive and (2) a legislative body, who working together in a representative capacity, have all the power of appointment, all power of legislation, all power to raise revenue and appropriate expenditures, and are required to create (3) a judiciary to pass upon the justice and legality of their government acts and to recognize (4) certain inherent individual rights.

Take away any one or more of those four elements and you are drifting into autocracy. Add one or more to those four elements and you are drifting into democracy.

Autocracy declares the divine right of kings; its authority can not be questioned; its powers are arbitrarily or unjustly administered. Democracy is the direct rule of the people and has been repeatedly tried without success. Our Constitutional fathers, familiar with the strength and weakness of both autocracy and democracy, with fixed principles definitely in mind, defined a representative republican form of government. They made a very marked distinction between a republic and a democracy and said repeatedly and emphatically that they had founded a republic.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt later ordered all copies of this manual withdrawn from the Government Printing Office and all US Army posts, to be destroyed without explanation. By 1952, America's fighting men were being instructed as follows:

Meaning of democracy: Because the United States is a democracy, the majority of the people decide how our government will be organized and run—and that includes the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The people do this by electing representatives, and these men and women then carry out the wishes of the people.

As Obama takes his nation further down the path to socialism, with majority support, it behoves devotees of America's founding principles to accept that the original checks and balances have somehow failed, and figure out how to make them unassailable next time.

On Jefferson's Memorial are quoted his words, "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." We must redouble our efforts to rescue an America he wouldn't recognize from that most insidious form of tyranny to which it has succumbed, mob rule.

SOLO (Sense of Life Objectivists): SOLOPassion.com

ENDS

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