Something happened to me coming home from Malaysia. On my flight from Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo, a skinny American gal with long straight black hair and big round glasses sat down next to me. She looked like a character from anime, so it didn’t surprise me when a moppy-haired Japanese boyfriend appeared next to her a while later. Cute couple, I thought.
After the plane took off, I noticed the girlfriend wrapping up the boyfriend in blankets, and putting her hand on his forehead multiple times. It wasn’t cold on the flight, so I suspected he was sick, but hoping I wouldn’t catch it. By the way he was squirming around, it seemed he couldn’t get comfortable or warm enough to sleep. Neither he nor she were wearing any kind of mask.
It wasn’t too long ago that nobody was allowed to travel without covid testing, etc. And it was mandatory to wear a mask on planes. Talk about a 180-degree turn, but now you can fly right next to someone with full-blown active covid and the airline offers you no protection whatsoever. It’s a risk you take when you travel, and in my case, it was very bad luck! On my second day home, I started getting symptoms, and after another day, I got full-blown covid too. I wonder how many more people were infected on that plane and how many people they in turn infected. Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows…
I feel irritable with covid. I was listening to a podcast the other day, not related to politics, and the guest mentioned she was working to “save democracy.” This rattled me more than it normally would. I yelled at my phone, “Oh my Gosh!” and immediately turned it off. Propaganda is a huge annoyance, especially when people use it to promote themselves as do-gooders. “Save democracy” is the code phrase for a club of delusional people who belong to a delusional group that does delusional things to justify their delusions. If you want to save democracy, then you support the government sending borrowed money all over the world for control, war, special interests, corruption, etc. OK!
But here’s the catch…the U.S. is not a democracy, so what exactly are these people trying to save? The United States of America is a Constitutional Republic. The U.S. Pledge of Allegiance makes no mention of democracy: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” It is the Constitutional Republic that supports liberty and justice. The word “democracy” is not found in the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitution. In fact, our founding fathers despised democracy, which is why they created a republic in the first place…
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams, 1814
“Our sages in the great constitutional convention intended our government should be a
republic which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.” —Fisher Ames
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” —Benjamin Franklin
“It has been observed that a true 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.” —Alexander Hamilton
“An elective despotism was not the government we fought for…” —Thomas Jefferson, 1782
“Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” —James Madison, 1787
“Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.” —Former Chief Justice John Marshall, 1836
“our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our state constitutions…none of the constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.” —Edmund Randolph, 1787
“A simple democracy … is one of the greatest of evils.” —Benjamin Rush, 1789
“A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay for it.” —Alexis De Tocqueville
“Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” —George Washington
Wow, right? You got that democracy is NOT a good guy’s MacGuffin? A constitutional republic is ruled by law, namely a constitution. A democracy is ruled by the majority, with no mention of law. If the majority of folks are brainwashed by propaganda, then the majority will support government in unlawful, unethical, and nonsensical acts, like toxic spending and war. That’s why it’s important to “save” democracy, even though the U.S. is a constitutional republic. Government can then spend like drunken sailors and override the law to do anything it wants. The long-term goal of any “Save Democracy” nonsense is to put an end to the Constitutional Republic and begin tyranny.
How did our founding fathers know to set up a system of checks and balances where government power is limited and decentralized? They were well educated and understood history. The first democracy was the Athenian Demokratia—from demos (the people) and kratos (power)—developed around the fifth century BC. But there were many different democracies in the city states (poleis) of ancient Greece, and all of them failed in tyranny. This got me thinking about how democracy recently returned to humankind and why anyone would want to resurrect a system that failed time and again.
My first thought was democracy is the path to tyranny because it’s inherently flawed. Plato was against democracy because he believed the majority was always wrong. This makes sense because the majority doesn’t think—individuals think, and most members of a majority follow some person or group that always gets corrupted and leads them astray. Democracy and fiat go hand-in-hand because both combined make government bigger and more powerful, while making people smaller, less independent and capable. In mathematics, the formula would look something like this: Democracy x Propaganda x Fiat = Tyranny, gradually, then suddenly.
I came upon a book, From Democrats To Kings (audible here), by Cambridge University Classicist Dr. Michael Scott. He described Ancient Athens differently than the “golden boys” you learned about in school. The Spartans of Thermopylae, who you thought where heroes, were actually warmongering bullies. It wasn’t losing the war against Sparta that put the Athenian democracy to death; it was Athens failing to keep up with the fast-paced global and political changes that were happening in the world. The Athenians were too busy picking fights and meddling. Despite a severe economic downturn, Athenian politicians continued to fight foreign wars and failed to deal with the surge in immigration.
Heavily reliant on overseas resources, Athens crashed when global trade routes were destabilized. Not to be presumptuous, but just last month, the BRICS took over all major global trade routes, permanently, and there’s war going on in the Middle East. After Athens crashed, domestic conflict dramatically increased, and the police force got defunded. Athenians had to self regulate their neighborhoods, etc. and suffered a lot. While the city survived many economic challenges, democracy didn’t make it. Any politicians who found it in their hearts to “save democracy” were either impeached, exiled, or executed. Anyone fanning the feathers of democracy was an enemy.
Our Constitutional Republic was badly damaged by the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. This opened the doors to interest rate manipulation, fractional-reserve banking, the 16th Amendment (Personal Income Tax), abandonment of the gold standard, bloated welfare, special interest groups, interfering in the affairs of other countries, deceptive accounting practices, massive borrowing, gigantic national debt, market manipulation, managed markets, casino markets, high health care costs, real estate bubbles, asset inflation, dollar devaluation, real estate tax, the everything bubble, NFTs, crypto currencies, the plunge protection team, the Great Depression, the Great Recession, crashes, manias, and much more.
Nvidia is the new empire! Ad Astra! AI to the stars! America, like Ancient Athens, doesn’t see reality or its flaws. It doesn’t fix anything, but keeps doing the same things over and over. It prints money, wages war, and sanctions countries who challenge the monetary system. It censors and smears people who see through the smokescreen and have a voice. The United States is being run behind a man who can’t think, and half the country is okay with this. In their transcendent Demokratia, the Athenians developed the Law of Eukrates to deal with its failures by authorizing the assassination of anyone who was opined to support a tyrant. Something similar to Trump Derangement Syndrome?
The Democratic Party—opposition to the U.S.A. as a Constitutional Republic—was founded in 1828. It supported more presidential power, military empire building, expansionism (including slavery), and making government bigger. It was normalized through the industrial revolutions. Are you sure about saving democracy? In a democracy, you are not innocent until proven guilty—you are guilty until proven innocent, and someone’s opinion of you can mean the end of you. In a democracy, there’s no liberty and justice for all. Opinion becomes the law, tyranny seeps through the cracks, and private-property rights disappear. If you are blue, be careful what you wish for, lest it all come true!
My blog posts are published every Sunday, and they’re free for anyone to read and share. If you would like to support me financially in this weekly process of thinking and writing, I’d be most grateful. For this reason, I started a Wendy Williamson Patreon page. If Patreon isn’t your thing, you can send a one-time gift via Paypal to me@wendywilliamson.com. Thank you! I do not have a job and the stocks that I own have not been kind to me.