Why Are Leftist Elites So Concerned about Democracy?

            Have you noticed the pessimistic attitudes of many elitists about democracy? Under recently, leftists did not seem to care at all about democracy, but many of them are crying about the loss of democracy. We hear it from politicians like Adam Schiff and want-a-be politicians like Hillary Clinton. We hear it from media personalities like Brian Williams. They all are terribly worried that democracy will be destroyed in 2024, if not in 2022.

            Victor Davis Hanson believes that he knows the answer: “The left expects to lose power over the next two years.” In 2020, Democrats won the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, and they have been running wild with the power of those positions. In doing so, “the left has managed in just 11 months to alienate a majority of voters.” Hanson then recounts the many ways that Democrats lost support. 

The nation has been wracked by unprecedented crime and nonenforcement of the borders. Leftist district attorneys either won’t indict criminals; they let them out of jails or both.

Illegal immigration and inflation are soaring. Deliberate cuts in gas and oil production helped spike fuel prices.

All this bad news is on top of the Afghanistan disaster, worsening racial relations, and an enfeebled president.

Democrats are running 10 points behind the Republicans in generic polls, with the midterms less than a year away.

President Joe Biden’s negatives run between 50% and 57% -- in Trump’s own former underwater territory.

Less than a third of the country wants Biden to run for reelection. In many head-to-head polls, Trump now defeats Biden.

In other words, leftist elites are terrified that democracy will work too robustly.

            Senators are sponsoring a bill to add four justices to the Supreme Court because they are terrified that the conservative justices will rule in favor of the Constitution. They clamored to defund the police and allowed hoodlums to burn and loot their cities. Now they are trying to hire more police.

Democrat policies have wrecked the economy and destroyed millions of jobs. Their policies have made the U.S. the laughingstock of the world and weakened our military. They mandate COVID-19 vaccinations even as data shows that vaccinated people are catching the new variant more than the unvaxed. Biden’s polling numbers are in the tank with only a third of Democrats supporting his re-election.

The Democrats are so fearful of the loss of democracy that all they can talk or write about is the January 6^th assault on the Capitol. Their so-called investigation is a witch hunt for Donald Trump and his supporters. The vision of increasing numbers of Americans is clearing, and they are starting to see the Democrats as they really are. Hanson continued:

[The leftists] are fearful and angry not because democracy doesn’t work, but because it does despite their own media and political efforts to warp it.   

    

When a party is hijacked by radicals and uses almost any means necessary to gain and use power for agendas that few Americans support, then average voters express their disapproval.

That reality apparently terrifies an elite. It then claims any system that allows the people to vote against the left is not people power at all.

            Americans must continue to awake and to see things as they really are. They must first learn that America is not a democracy. The Founders created America as a democratic republic because they knew that democracies are easy to overthrow. That is why Democrats want to do away with the Electoral College and have presidents elected on a popular vote. The Founders understood what they were doing and why they were doing it. The problem comes from Americans of our day who do not understand the greatness of America and want to fundamentally transform the United States. If leftists are allowed to remain in power, they will destroy America as we know it.

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Democracy?

            The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is democracy. Is it possible to have too much democracy? If so, is too much democracy a bad thing?

            From its organization, leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have taught that the U.S. Constitution was inspired by God. In a revelation published given to the Prophet Joseph Smith at Kirtland, Ohio, on December 16 and 17, 1833, and published as Doctrine and Covenants 101, Jesus Christ gave the following information concerning the Constitution of the United States.

77 According to the laws and constitution of the people, which I have suffered to be established, and should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles;

78 That every man may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment.

79 Therefore, it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another.

80 And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood.

            The Lord explained in these verses that the U.S. Constitution was to protect the rights and freedoms of all people for the purpose of allowing them to use their moral agency to choose how they want to live. He also said that He “established the Constitution … by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose.”

Leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ continue to teach that the Constitution was divinely inspired. In the April 2021 General Conference, President Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency, spoke on the topic “Defending Our Divinely Inspired Constitution.” President Oaks that this claim of a divinely inspired Constitution “does not mean that divine revelation dictated every word and phrase.” This is one reason why the Constitution has been amended so many times. 

However, President Oaks identified five principles that he believes were divinely inspired. Those principles are: (1) We the People are the source of government power. (2) The delegated power of government is divided be between the nation and its subsidiary states, meaning our federal system. (3) The separation of power between the three branches of government – executive, legislative, and judicial. (4) The implementation of the Bill of Rights, a “cluster of vital guarantees of individual rights and specific limits on government authority.”

(5) The vital purpose of the entire Constitution. “We are to be governed by law and not by individuals, and our loyalty is to the Constitution and its principles and processes, not to any office holder. In this way, all persons are to be equal before the law.”

            Justin Collings, a professor at Brigham Young University Law School and a fellow at the Wheatley Institute, wrote the first in a five-part series with plans to write upon the five points outlined by President Oaks. The title of his essay is “Opinion: What do you do when democracy is too much of a good thing?” He stated that the answer to this question is found “in the U.S. Constitution’s inspired balance between popular rule and centralized power.” He quoted Thomas Jefferson as saying: 

We have been fellow-laborers and fellow-sufferers, and heaven has rewarded us with a happy issue from our struggles. It rests now with ourselves alone to enjoy in peace and concord the blessings of self-government, so long denied to mankind: to show by example the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs and that the will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man.

            To Jefferson, the purpose for the eight long years of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) was to gain “the blessings of self-government.” It was self-government that the Constitution was designed to secure. Collings continued with his explanation:

In the summer of 1776, in the most famous paragraph he ever penned, Jefferson proclaimed “self-evident” truth that “governments … deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Four score and seven years later, Abraham Lincoln described the country’s deadliest crisis as a test of whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people” could “long endure.”

For both Jefferson and Lincoln, then, “America” was an experiment in self-government – in what political theorists called “popular sovereignty.”

            The Founders of America, the Framers of the Constitution, and Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War all understood that the idea of popular sovereignty was an experiment. Could the people of any nation govern themselves? Ancient Greeks debated the concept of rule by the people. It was also a point considered during the French Revolution. Collings explained why the idea works sometimes and does not at other times.

Did this mean that the people shouldn’t govern at all? Not necessarily. The key was to distinguish between popular sovereignty and day-to-day governance. The people could govern themselves by delegating lawmaking powers to their chosen representatives. Self-government didn’t require actual governing. It proceeded via representation. It required only what Jefferson called “the consent of the governed.”

The rub was how to secure that consent – how to ensure that representatives pursue the people’s interest, rather than their own, and that legislation reflect the people’s considered wishes, not just momentary passions. This was the conundrum, above all others, that perplexed the framers of the U.S. Constitution.

            Collings’ essay has much more information in it, and I encourage you to read it. It is important for all Americans to understand that the Constitution of the United States organized a democratic republic and not a democracy. Yes, the people vote for the candidate that they want to be the next President of the United States. However, the President is not elected on a popular vote.

This is where the Electoral College and the idea of representatives come into the picture. The people vote for who they want to be President, but their vote actually chooses which delegates vote in the Electoral College. If candidate A gets more votes than candidate B, the delegates for candidate A votes in the Electoral College.

This is also one reason why the members of the U.S. House of Representatives must stand for re-election every two years. They represent the people, and they can be removed from office much more quickly than Senators – who should be representing their states.

To answer the question about too much democracy, the answer is yes. In a pure democracy, the people can vote themselves into total destruction. In a democratic republic, there are checks and balances all along the way, and this is the reason why the United States of America has existed under the Constitution for more than 200 years.

House of Representatives

Provision 10 of the United States Constitution (Article I.2.1) is that the members of the House of Representatives shall be elected by qualified voters in each of the states. The people had the Right to vote for their own representatives. This provision made the United States a democratic republic. A democracy involves all the citizens participating in the way government runs. When the people elect representatives to do the work of government, it is called a republic. We have a democratic republic because the masses of qualified voters elect their own representatives and then the representatives pass the laws and run the government. The Founders of our nation had great confidence in the American people. At the time our Constitution was written, there was no government on earth where the people elected their own representatives. They apparently understood that a pure democracy could not last. "Two hundred years ago a noted historian Alexander Tyler explained, `A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until [a majority of] the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse [gifts] from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy [taxing and spending], always followed by a dictatorship. The average life of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years'" (quoted in The Making of America - The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution by W. Cleon Skousen, p 265). The Founders wanted to have a government "of the people, by the people, for the people" without the problems caused by a true democracy. Skousen explained, "A people's `constitutional' republic is sometimes called a `federal' republic or `democratic' republic, This system is based on the supreme will of the people, which is expressed in a written constitution. It was invented by the American Founding Fathers. This American system divides power vertically and horizontally and assigns to each level of government those responsibilities which can be most efficiently and economically administered there. It proved to be the soundest system of government ever devised by man" (The Making of America, p 265). Skousen lists the following advantages of a republic with quotes from the Founders to support them: 1) "Wise representatives can benefit the public more than the public can benefit itself;" 2) "In a Republic, a majority rule is the first principle;" 3) "A Republic is the only means of securing equal rights;" 4) "Every citizen has a voice and a vote" (Making of America, p 266). The Founders hoped that by founding our nation as a democratic republic that the country could grow bigger without becoming divided. An easy way to explain this principle would be to compare a family council with father, mother and children discussing family concerns with a council for an extended family where only the representatives of each group come together to make decisions.