I am short on time this week, I'm attending a conference on sound money (aka "hard currency," meaning gold and silver). So, in lieu of a lengthy discourse, I present a few quick talking points for the next time some ignorant liberal calls the Great Republic a "democracy." (Sources are included where I know them.):
George Washington (1732–99):
Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, under no form of government will laws be better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness be more effectually dispensed to mankind.
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), 2 statements made on separate occasions:
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
The Constitution was meant to be republican, and we believe it to be republican according to every candid interpretation
Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747–1813), British author, in The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
John Marshall (1755–1835), 4th Chief Justice of the United States:
Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.
Alexander Hamilton (c.1756–1804), 2 statements made on separate occasions:
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.
We are now forming a Republican form of government. Real Liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton (1834-1902), British historian:
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994), Secretary of Agriculture to Pres. Eisenhower, in An Enemy Hath Done This:
Ours is a representative republic with a Constitution in which is recognized the natural law and the natural rights of man. It is a republic with a spiritual foundation characterized by freedom – freedom for the individual and for his society.
Henry Percy, 9th Duke of Northumberland (1912–40), British historian, in The History of World Revolution:
The adoption of democracy as a form of government by all European nations is fatal to good government, to liberty, to law and order, to respect for authority, and to religion, and must eventually produce a state of chaos from which a new world tyranny will arise.
Robert Welch, Jr., founder of the John Birch Society (1899–1985) in a speech at a Constitution Day luncheon, 17 September 1961:
And for well over a hundred years our politicians, statesmen, and people remembered that this was a republic, not a democracy, and knew what they meant when they made that distinction. . . . And it was under Wilson that the first great propaganda slogan was coined and emblazoned everywhere, to make Americans start thinking favorably of democracies and forget that we had a republic.
And, finally, from The United States Army Manual (1928), under "Citizenship Training, Definitions":
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 of the law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy . . . [the Constitution] made a very marked distinction between a republic and a democracy . . . and said repeatedly and emphatically that they had formed a republic.
Feel free to use these often and to the utter dismay of the liberal wing of America.
Thanks for listening, tune in next week for another rant.
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