To the Editor;
Repeat after me: “We are not a democracy.” You could say, as some do, that we are a democratic republic. Yet, in all of our founding documents, the word democracy does not appear at all, not once. We are a constitutional republic. Emphasis on constitutional.
People who insist that we abolish the Electoral College are confused on this point. They reason that if we were a democracy, it must follow that we should elect the president directly with a popular vote.
But in fact, by design, there is no voting at all at the federal level. As a republic, we are a federation of separate, often disparate states. Under Art. I, § 4, Cl. 1, referred to as the Elections Clause, all voting is at the state level, under the exclusive control of the individual state legislatures. The president is thus elected by the states through electors, not directly by the people. Introducing majority rule in the election of our highest office would obviate and contradict the very federal nature of our republic, effectively erasing the states and their individual right to be heard and counted. We would further be vulnerable to the same risk of authoritarian demagogues such as arose in Europe during the last century.
The Founding Fathers considered democracy dangerous. They had studied 2,000 years of history and governance. They studied Machiavelli’s The Prince and Hobbes’ Leviathan.
They understood that there was one constant throughout history: that human nature does not change. They knew that democracy, whenever it raised its capricious head, became the tyranny of the masses. It was mob rule. They knew that Socrates was literally voted to death, democratically, by the citizens of Athens. His offense? Socrates warned about the dangers of democracy and its tendency to be influenced by demagogues. It was cloaked as “corrupting the youth.” It cost him his life.
Benjamin Franklin said two thousand years later, “democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner.”
Not four years after the American Constitution was ratified, Franklin’s words were proven tragically prophetic as democracy ran amok in France during the Terror of the French Revolution, during which the majority, by popular demand, sent thousands to the guillotine, even consuming the demagogues themselves.
James Madison said of democracy in Federalist #10: “…instability, injustice, and confusion … have in truth been the mortal disease under which popular governments everywhere perished…” He was proven right by the likes of Robespierre.
The founders were so concerned about the dangers of an unchecked majority they included two particular features in the Constitution as safeguards against it.
One was the Bill of Rights, such that the majority, embodied in the state, could not abridge the rights of the individual. A democratic majority could not vote away the life, property or freedom of any citizen. Those inalienable rights were subject to the rigors of due process. That is the very point and the overarching principle of our constitutional republic.
The other feature was the electoral college, which provided that the states elected the president, not the masses. Otherwise, individual small states or regions would be crushed by leviathans like California, New York and Texas.
In this age of mass media, it is ever more critical that we do not abandon the Constitution and succumb to today’s demagogues who promote abolishing the Electoral College.
The authors of the Constitution gave us a miraculous document, which is now the oldest, most successful in human history. Think carefully about the conceit of believing that this generation, of all generations, has a better idea.
Ron Wisner, Marion
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