Please, let us keep the Democratic Republic alive.

America, a good way to remember and thank Veterans would to be an American and fight to keep our democratic republic in place and not lety us slip down into a despotic banana republic!

Let’s face it America, it has come time to show Franklins that we can keep it. Remember Franklin’s challenge when asked what the constitution was, – “a Republic if you can keep it”. Or do we slide down to become a banana republic with a dictatorship?

Keep in mind that the next “Trump” might be worse than this one.

(Thanks to Dan Collins for the lemming characters.)

Voting Donald Trump out of office was crucial, but it will not be enough to save the American experiment.

Many critics have used the words “authoritarian” or “fascist” to describe the president’s mode of politics, as if he were an invader from outside our democratic way of life. In fact, Mr. Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against: He is a demagogue, a popular leader who feeds on the hatred of elites that grows naturally in democratic soil. We have almost forgotten how common such creatures are in democracies because we have relied on a technology designed to restrain them: the Constitution. It has worked by setting up rules for us to follow, but also on a deeper level by shaping our sense of what we are proud of and what we are ashamed of in our common life. Today this constitutional culture has all but collapsed, and with it, our protection against demagogues.

For most of the history of Western political thought, writers focused on demagoguery only in the context of arguing that democracy was a poor form of government. Aristocratic critics such as Thucydides and Plato blamed popular leaders for dismissing experts, exploiting the poor and soaking the rich, sparking factional violence, and starting foreign wars to distract the populace from their tyrannical tendencies. Since these writers thought it obvious that democracies were natural breeding grounds for demagogues, their strategy for eliminating demagoguery was to support alternatives to democratic government: If you don’t like wolves, don’t create a wolf habitat.

The framers of our Constitution were not satisfied with that anti-democratic view, but they were persuaded that a democracy would not work well unless it found ways to defang demagogues. They thought of their constitution-making as an experiment to see whether they could “refine and enlarge” the democratic will, in Madison’s words, civilizing the inevitable conflict between popular leaders and elites and channeling it into a sustainable form of politics. Right now, the experiment is not succeeding.

Have a nice day!

1 thought on “Please, let us keep the Democratic Republic alive.”

  1. What has to be remember also,, is that most of the demogogues, are really not at war with the elite as they try to convince the rest of us that they are. Like trump, they usually come from the ranks of the rich and elite…or at least privileged, and use our anger against us to divide us against each other. That’s what trump did, for sure.

Leave a Reply