The founders of the United States of America recongized the dangers of pure democracy. With that in mind, they went about creating a republican form of government. Sovereign states joined together to form a union, with built in protections against factions.
James Madison explained this in Federalist #10. Madison recognized societal divisions and class warfare.
The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.
He explained that the causes of faction cannot be removed, that the only way to do so is to take away liberty. The government’s role is not to remove the causes, but to control the effects of factions. Madison went on to spell out the differences between a pure democracy and a republican form of government.
The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.
Democrats desire to remove the causes of faction by exacerbating it to gain power. They promote class warfare and envy and promise equal outcomes, regardless of effort or ability. They believe that once they re-distribute wealth, the lower classes will be happy and satisfied and factions will then be eliminated.
For the most part, Americans reject these ideas, but in times of economic uncertainty the Democrats gain favor. These are the times they are most likely to gain a super majority to circumvent the republican process. When people are afraid for their future, they are easier to bribe. A person is much more willing to cede liberty for security when their finances are squeezed and they’re unsure about their future.
Our government was designed to protect our rights and our property. Barack Obama is using the current crisis to kindle a flame of fear and envy in the American people. (At the same time he’s backing Republicans into a corner, which explains all of the populist rhetoric coming out of the right.) If he’s able to build a large enough faction he will be our next President. With Congress controlled by the Democrats there will be no protection of property. They have stated they will take one’s property (income or profit) and give it to another.
Why should the middle class believe they won’t be the next victims of this mugging by the majority? Asking the government to provide you with things such as health care, tax rebates (when you pay no taxes) and green jobs is asking for the government to distinguish liberty. Are we ready to go there yet again? If so, where will it end?
Good job, TLC. You have captured Obama’s–and the Left’s–approach to life.
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Madison brilliantly defines one of the reasons why we occupy different stations in life, and why there will always be diversity in the amount of property and wealth we amass. Our faculties, which is to say our intellectual, physical and spiritual gifts, are different in quality and degree. All else being equal, our faculties alone dictate different material outcomes for our lives. Nothing will change that. But efforts will always be made, of one kind or another, to prevent the less gifted or more deeply immured from being submersed entirely, and to prevent the more gifted, or simply more acquisitive and their less gifted offspring, from building insulated hegemonies.
The triumph of the republic is that it accommodates the variation in human faculties and human weaknesses by an evolving, organic system of moderated/modified democracy that lets no evil trend infect the entire body of the nation. Madison specifies dangers such as political factions influenced by religious sects, referencing the warring Protestant and Catholic forces in the England of his cohort’s recent past, and casts a light forward to today’s sects — fundamentalist Christianity in the U.S. and theocratic Islam in the Middle East. In the so-called attempted “equal” division of property, Madison foretells communism, but since that disaster had not yet arrived during his life, Madison could not have foreseen how completely and bloodily the Bolsheviks would fail in that attempt.
The commentator contends, however, that the Democratic party – that exceedingly young, temporary, constantly mutating body – desires to REMOVE faction. What the commentator draws this conclusion from is his subjective interpretation of the Democratic party’s very imperfect attempts since the early 1930s to mitigate some of the effects, on a burgeoning population, of an American economic system Madison never envisioned in which great wealth would be generated by banking and the fluctuation of international currencies, along with such practices as the trading of stocks on margin. These and a myriad of ephemeral means, far removed from the basics industries of his day: ocean-bound merchant trade, “small shop” trade, artisans, and, by far the greatest, agriculture. Not agribusiness nor agritech. Farming.
Madison also was fortunate enough to have missed the excesses of 19nth century moguls such as Fisk, Vanderbilt and a menagerie of others whose wealth was less a result of their God-given faculties than a product of their lack of scruples and sense of shame.
Ignoring these matters, the commentator claims to see the Democratic party, a sort of idée fixe of his, promoting class warfare. Cast this claim in perspective against that genuine model of class warfare — the cultural revolution in China staged by Mao throughout the Sixties. Only in our Civil War have we seen violence that exceeded that of Mao’s China. Envy, in fact, is seen by the commentator as the exclusive demon of the Democrats, even though the Bible spotted it as the work of Satan some considerable millennia before FDR came along. And the “promise of equal outcomes” that the commentator sees the Democrats using to poison the minds of the seething masses, must be the most widely derided and sneered at promise in history.
It might be easier for the commentator if he and his followers simply became thicker skinned. If conservatives want to believe that Madison is teaching them that the poor cannot be assisted without diminishing the right of the more highly gifted to amass wealth without limit, then they must learn to live with the simmering result.
is a sad finale for an essay that began with some promise. The good news is that his fears are ungrounded. Capitalism, once it regains its health after a period of criminal abuse from adherents to both parties, will continue to give humanity its best chance at a satisfying and prosperous life.
I don’t know what the authors of the Federalist Papers would make of the commentator’s conclusion. The idea that the current Democratic candidate for the Presidency (possibly with the help of 62-year-old William Ayers) is coming to take everyone’s property and give it to the poor (how?) is a tale to scare children with. An American who believes it is not fit to live in the land we justly claim as that of the free and the brave. Cowards are neither. With the election to come and the inauguration that follows, another small period of history will begin as another brief period of history will end. And that is all that will end.
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So weird – A left winger talking about lack of scruples or sense of shame.
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Andrew – I’m a she, not a he.
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LC,
I suspected you were, but assumed you wouldn’t mind when, in order to shift pronouns rather than repeat the genderless “commentator,” I would alternate it with the traditional “he.” To do anything else would either be ungrammatical (single case commentator with plural they? Never), or cave in to the feminists with their he/she nonsense. Which, seriously, I try hard not to do.
No disrespect, though, LC, and I thought it was a good piece of writing.
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No offense was taken, I just thought I’d spare you any confusion.
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