America was established as a Republic. As a Republic, it was designed to protect the liberty and the freedom of the American citizenry. Over the last two centuries, various individuals have “improved” upon this concept by replacing a Liberty protecting Republic, into a oligarchy ruled pretend-Democracy.
Here we take a look at this transition. We do so based on the book “Liberty in Peril,” by Randall Holcombe.
In his book, he challenges the presumption that liberty and democracy are complementary. They are not. You can either have a Republic, or you can have a Democracy. You cannot have both simultaneously.
High School Civics Class
There is no such thing as democracy. It's a sweet utopia. US was the first country to show threat only money design your status and access to privileges of 21st century. Western EU countries (like Germany) show that an average citizen has little to zero control over own countries processes. There is no such thing as democracy. there are fairy tales about it which are used as a tool of politics from the neo imperialist West towards everybody else. They consider us all savages and act accordingly. Because they are so "special" (remember one of this degenerative Obama-speeches?) - Michael Goryany
When I took history and government in school, many critical issues were misrepresented. They were given short shrift, and in many instances ignored entirely.
These omissions greatly hampered my understanding of America and created mysteries that my teachers could not answer.
- How can you have the fourth amendment, and also have the sixteenth amendment at the same time? One permits you to keep your financial affairs private, the other requires that you disclose them under the penalty of law.
- How can you have a second amendment that cannot be infringed, and an ATF who’s entire purpose and objective is to infringe on the second amendment?
- How can the United States be a Republic when the general population can vote for the President?
Indeed, the confusing nature of what America was founded as, and the way America was managed undermined my ability to understand what America really was.
Randall Holcombe’s book, Liberty in Peril: Democracy and Power in American History, fills in some very substantial gaps.
I believe that it is particularly great in regard to American constitutionalism, what it is, and what it was intended to be. He spends time describing how it has morphed from protecting liberty to advancing democracy instead. As well as how this love of “democracy” has run roughshod over Americans at the expense of liberty.
It does so with a host of novel and important insights rather than the disinterest generated by the books I suffered through in school.
The Role of Government
Holcombe gets right to the main point:
The role of government as [America’s founders] saw it, was to protect the rights of individuals, and the biggest threat to individual liberty was the government itself.
This is beautiful.
I only wish that it was taught in schools this way.
The American government was designed to protect the Rights of individuals.
... So they designed a government with constitutionally limited powers, constrained to carry out only those activities specifically allowed by the Constitution.
Our nation was designed to have a very small government, with the restrictions on it, large, and clearly defined.
This book describes how the fundamental principle underlying American government has been transformed over the years…
...from protecting individual liberty... ...to carrying out the will of the people, as revealed by a democratic decision-making process. (p. xxii)
Holcombe begins by laying out the case that…
“...the Founders had no intention of creating a democracy... ...in the sense of a government that would be guided by popular opinion,” (p. 5)
…in sharp contrast to current “understanding.” Where the point of government is to take polls and gauge public opinion. Then pretend to react to the opinion poll results.
Which of course is meaningless.
Studies have shown that the government does what it wants.
The media creates fake polls, and fake news, and fake opinion pieces and fake outrage to justify the governmental actions.
And what makes the transformation from a central focus on liberty to a central focus on democracy that routinely invades liberty…
... particularly significant is that the powers embodied in America’s twenty-first-century democratic government are those that eighteenth-century Americans revolted against to escape. (p. 7)
Liberty used to be important.
Since I do not have the space to dissect all of the issues in Liberty in Peril, I would like to highlight a few particularly noteworthy things.
Holcombe starts with John Locke, which is a common place to start for those interested in advancing liberty.
But he also calls attention to Cato’s Letters, which was one of the most influential—but now almost completely ignored—influences leading to the birth of the American Revolution.
I have long been struck by how many of the insights our founders are credited with that actually trace back there (see the first major chapter of my book Lines of Liberty), and I echo Holcombe’s invitation for more people to discover it.
Are Liberty and Democracy Complementary?
Liberty in Peril challenges the typical current presumption that liberty and democracy are complementary.
They are not.
If anything, they are direct opposites.
The principle of liberty suggests that first and foremost, the government’s role is to protect the rights of individuals. The principle of democracy suggests that collective decisions are made according to the will of the majority… The greater the allowable scope of democracy in government, the greater the threat to liberty… In particular, the ascendancy of the concept of democracy threatens the survival of the free market economy, which is an extension of the Founders’ views on liberty. (pp. 14-15)
This is reflected in the changing nature of elections.
At one time, elections might have been viewed as a method of selecting competent people to undertake a job with constitutionally-specified limits. With the extension of democracy, elections became referendums on public policy. (p. 20)
Consensus vs. Democracy
The book also challenges commonly held presumptions that our Founders wanted democracy.
But while “the Founders wanted those in charge of government’s operations to be selected by a democratic process,”... ... they “also wanted to insulate those who ran the government from direct influence by its citizens”... ... because “[b]y insulating political decision-makers from directs accountability to citizens... ... the government would be in a better position to adhere to its constitutionally-mandated limits.” (p. 15)
And today, in 2020 we see how absolutely correct this assessment is.
“Thus, the Constitution created a limited government designed to protect liberty, not to foster democracy.” (p. 16)
But the United States…
“consistently has moved toward more democracy, and the unintended side effect has been a reduction in liberty.” (p. 25)
After all, that was the sole purpose of both the 12th and the 17th amendments.
Holcombe lays out issues of consensus versus democracy, with consensus illustrated by market systems in which all those whose property rights are involved agree to transactions, (p. 29) but in government…
“a group is able to undertake more extensive collective action if it requires less consensus to act.” (p. 30)
And the slippery slope is that…
The more citizens want to further national goals through government action, the less consensus they will demand in the collective decision-making process. (p. 33)
An In-Depth Study of the Constitution
Another notable aspect of Liberty in Peril is how far beyond the typical discussion of constitutional issues it goes, substantially expanding readers’ understanding in intriguing ways.
For instance, how many Americans know of the Iroquois Constitution, which focused on unanimity?
How many are aware of the Albany Plan of Union, drawn up in 1754, or how it was influenced by the Iroquois Constitution?
How many know that a “clear chain of constitutional evolution proceeds from the Albany Plan of Union to the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution of the United States”? (p. 43)
How many have noticed that “when compared with the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution clearly less constraining than the document it supplanted…the Constitution did not limit the powers of government; it expanded them”? (p. 48) Yet,
While the authors of the Constitution did deliberately expand the powers of the federal government, they just as deliberately tried to prevent the creation of a democratic government. (p. 52)
How many are aware of what the Confederate Constitution tells us about the US Constitution.
As well as the drift from its principles since its adoption.
This is especially true because…
“the problems that the authors of the Confederate Constitution actually did address were overwhelmingly associated with the use of legislative powers. Yes, legislative powers used to impose costs on the general public to provide benefits to narrow constituencies”? (p. 107)
The Constitution often is portrayed as a document that limits the power of the federal government and guarantees the liberty of its citizens…
When compared to the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution places less constraint on the federal government and allows those who run the government more discretion and autonomy and less accountability.
The adoption of the Constitution enhanced the powers of government and laid the foundation for two centuries of government growth. (pp. 66-67)
The Elitist Constitution
Holcombe’s section on “The Elitist Constitution” is fascinating.
It lays out the case for why…
“[t]he Constitution devised democratic processes for collective decision-making, but the Founders had no intention of designing a government that would respond to the will of the majority,” (p. 70)
…as illustrated by the fact that citizens …
“had almost no direct input into the federal government as the Constitution was originally written and ratified.” (p. 70)
The section on the Electoral College is even more striking, as it stands in sharp variance from the presumptions behind almost the entire current debate over the National Popular Vote compact:
[A]t the time the Constitution was written the Founders anticipated that in most cases no candidate would receive votes from a majority of the electors. The Founders reasoned that most electors would vote for one candidate from their own states… ...and it would be unlikely that voting along state lines would produce any candidate with a majority of the votes. (p. 75)
Consequently,
The Founders envisioned that in most cases the president would end up being chosen by the House of Representatives from the list of the top-five electoral vote recipients… Furthermore, there was no indication that the number of electoral votes received should carry any weight besides creating a list of the top five candidates… The process was not intended to be democratic. (p. 76)
I found the issues discussed above to be of particular interest. But there is far more in the book to learn from, and often be surprised by, in comparison to what history courses usually teach.
America’s Evolution Away From Founding Values
Such issues include the evolution of parties, the influence of Andrew Jackson, who …
“fought for democracy, but, ironically, the result of making the nation’s government more democratic has been to expand the scope and power of government in response to popular demands for govern programs,” (p. 91)
which…
... “the Founders foresaw and tried to guard against by limiting the role of democracy in their new government,” (p. 91), ...the War Between the States (“the single most important event in the transformation of American government,” (p. 93)
And, including the elimination of state succession as a real possibility, the Reconstruction Era amendments, the origins of interest group politics, the evolution of federal regulatory power, the evolution of the incentives of civil servants, the Sixteenth Amendment (income tax) as
“a response to the demand for a larger federal government,” (p. 149)
…a different take on the 1920s, in which …
“[f]ar from representing a retreat from progressivism, the 1920s extended the now-established orthodoxy, (p. 154)
…added insight into the New Deal and the courts, Social Security as the …
“one New Deal program for the responsibility for fundamentally transforming the historical, constitutional role of the federal government,” (p. 175)
…how
...“The Great Society represents the ultimate triumph of democracy, because for the first time a major expansion in the scope of government was based on the demands of the electorate, with no extenuation circumstances” (p. 205),
…and far more.
In sum, there are very many good reasons to recommend Liberty in Peril. In it, Randall Holcombe provides not just a powerful and insightful look into crucial aspects of America’s evolution away from the principles of the revolution that created it but also an important warning:
Unfortunately, many Americans do not appear to fully understand these dangers as they continue to push the foundations of their government away from liberty and toward democracy. (p. 225)
Why is this important?
Now, global capital has created a tiny minority of wealthy people who make the feudal lords seem almost a New York rush hour crowd by comparison. As few as three multi-billionaire Americans have as much combined wealth as 150 million Americans, all of those expected to dutifully troop off to the polls and vote for continuing the system that is moving much closer to a financial breakdown, with more pain and suffering for more Americans and the rest of the world than the last collapse caused. Using public funds to bail out private wealth temporarily saved that one and the public good be damned. That cannot be allowed to happen again, and uprisings all over the world are taking place because more people can’t take it anymore. They feel the pain and see the handwriting on the wall, which may still be beyond those of us who can only use our smartphones to get dumb news which tells us nothing but what consciousness control pays its media to cram into our heads. ... It once was easier to get away with when there were enough people getting by to feel comfortable enough to think maybe it would eventually all work out for the best. That former working middle class is sinking lower, the lower class is in more misery than ever in modern times, and the tiny minority at the top is richer than ever before based on its purchase of armies and a professional class also dwindling in numbers but still numerous enough to transform minds and politics into acceptance of the economic slavery that passes for democracy. It can’t and won’t last much longer and if we wait for nature to take action it will obviously be a disaster. But if we organize and act as a human race, facing our problems as a race threatened with annihilation if we don’t work together, the result could be the salvation offered by real democracy in which the words of past revolutionaries like Malcolm and Martin become the actions of the present generation. That means ending capitalism and beginning humanity. - Frank Scott’s political commentary and satire are online at the blog legalienate: http//legalienate.blogspot.com
Conclusions
Here are my “take aways” for whatever it is worth.
- The founders did not intend, nor want, America to be a “democracy”.
- They wanted America to be a Republic.
- A Republic protects individual rights and freedoms, not to mention liberty.
- A “democracy” is mob rule and is easily manipulated by people with money, power and influence.
- This is what happened to America.
- Today, America is a “democracy” in name, and an oligarchy by function.
- As an oligarchy, as history clearly states, that it will end catastrophically.
- The ONLY was to avoid catastrophic turmoil is to drastically alter the current operating framework that the United States exists under. It must go from “democracy” to something else…
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