What Is Democracy?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is democracy. From the time that Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States, Democrats have declared that our democracy is in danger. They are claiming that the United States is a democracy, something that the Founders guarded against.

The United States is a democratic republic, a combination of a democracy and a republic. The Founders understood that democracies do not last for long, and they sought to set up a government that would last. They set up a republic with some democratic characteristics.

According to Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a democracy is a “government by the people; especially, rule of the majority.” It is “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.” 

Meriam-Webster defines a republic as “a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president; a political unit (such as a nation) having such a form of government; a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law; a political unit (such as a nation) have such a form of government.” 

In other words, both democracies and republics are governments of the people. However, a democracy is a nation where the majority rules, and a republic is a nation where the people elect representatives to run the government. A democracy has been defined as “two wolves and one sheep” – the majority gets what they want regardless of what happens to the minority. In a republic, the people elect representatives who are elected by the popular vote. Even though the people vote for who they want for President, the POTUS is actually elected by representatives in the Electoral College.

Democrats seek to change our government into a strict majority where the POTUS is elected by a popular vote. The majority would have all the power, and the minority would not matter. This is the reason they always make a big deal about which candidate wins the popular vote. Democrats desire to get rid of the Electoral College and turn campaigns into popularity votes.

Any person, who desires to know whether Democrats or Republicans seek to destroy democracy, needs to only look at the words and actions of members of both parties. It is Democrats who seek to destroy the Electoral College. It is always Democrats who seek to add more justices to the Supreme Court – to pack the court -- to gain power over the conservative justices. It is Democrats who sanction violence against conservative justices on the Supreme Court and conservatives nominated to become justices and judges. Consider the following information published by Josh Hammer at The Daily Signal: 

More recently, in the aftermath of the just-completed Supreme Court term, many notable Democrats have resuscitated the threat of court-packing, which had momentarily died down following the ambiguous conclusions and recommendations of President Joe Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, which disbanded on Dec. 8, 2021.

(It is curious that Democrats have chosen to do this now, even as this term had fewer 6-3 “ideological” splits than the prior term and even as the two justices who found themselves in the court majority least frequently this term were the two most consistent conservatives, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.)

There are few threats as vehemently anti-democratic as that of packing the Supreme Court. As even the Democrat-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee concluded in its bone-chilling 1937 report issued after Democratic presidential icon FDR’s own court-packing proposal.

Let us of the Seventy-fifth Congress, in words that will never be disregarded by any succeeding Congress, declare that we would rather have an independent court, a fearless court, a court that will dare to announce its honest opinions in what it believes to be the defense of the liberties of the people, than a court that, out of fear or sense of obligation to the appointing power, or factional passion, approves any measure we may enact. We are not the judges of the judges. We are not above the Constitution.

Consider also the extraordinary preliminary injunction granted earlier this week by Judge Terry Doughty in the case of Missouri v. Biden, which pertains to what this column has previously referred to as the Biden regime’s intentional “collapse” of the “public-private distinction.”

In a whirlwind 155-page ruling, Doughty validated the plaintiffs’ complaints that the Biden administration eroded the First Amendment by dictating that social media companies censor specific users, accounts, and posts to tamp down on COVID-19 “disinformation” and “misinformation.”

In Doughty’s own words, that should terrify anyone even remotely concerned about the actual state of American democracy: “The United States government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” Yikes.

But the Biden regime disagrees. Indeed, the administration has already appealed the grant of the preliminary injunction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit. We should not mince words here: The Biden Department of Justice is appealing to the 5^th Circuit for the “right” to jawbone putatively “private” companies into censoring disfavored online speech when it comes to certain sensitive subjects that implicate regime priorities.

That is simply astonishing. So much for “our democracy” – the Left would prefer that the public and private merge together to squash all who dare to dissent from regime orthodoxy. In Political Science 101 class, most freshmen learn that this is a trademark trait not of democracy, but of fascism.

In reality, the Left’s crocodile tears about the fate of “our democracy” can be easily explained by the fact that when Democrats and left-wing activists speak of “democracy,” they really mean “progressivism.”

It is quite a sleight of hand. The victim of that sleight of hand, unfortunately and ironically, is actual American democracy itself.

The bottom line is that Americans should be aware that Democrats are trying to destroy America. Anyone that is genuinely concerned about democracy in American should remember that America has a democratic republic. They should carefully look at the actions of those claiming to be protecting democracy.