At the Virginia Ratifying of the U.S. Constitution, Chief Justice James Wilson, one of six people to sign both the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, proudly exclaimed, “The supporters of the Constitution claim the title of being firm friends of the liberty and the rights of mankind …. as the best means of protecting liberty. We, sir, idolize democracy. Those who oppose it have bestowed eulogiums on monarchy … We admire it because we think it a well-regulated democracy. It is recommended to the good people of this country …. to secure their freedom.”
He continues to explain the idea of whether to call America a republic or democracy, stating, “The people at large, retain the supreme power and act either collectively or by representation.”
Throughout our history we have functioned as a representative democracy. Every branch of government derives directly or indirectly from the people. Thomas Jefferson shows this importance with the collaboration of the terms when he explains, “We may say with truth and meaning, that governments are more or less republican as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition.”
In 1938, E.B. White described democracy as “the line that forms on the right. It is the ‘don’t’ in ‘don’t shove.’ It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time …. To be free … is to feel that you belong to earth … is to feel at home in a democratic framework.” Democracy is the feeling of being part of something bigger within our communities.
In the midst of a Civil War, Abraham Lincoln fervently defended the American experiment as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people by using the terms constitutional republic and representative democracy interchangeably.
However difficult it is to understand American constitutional design, Lincoln pressed, “the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible.”
Lincoln defined popular government that can guide your understanding of democracy or a republic as “a majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.”
The Constitution established a representative democracy, a republic, in which voters would elect lawmakers who would represent the people.
Republicans like to talk about freedom, liberty, and justice, while using the American flag and the Bible to disguise their embrace of fascism, contempt for the rule of law, and support for an unrepentant convicted felon and adjudicated rapist.
This is what E.B. White warns us about when he described the fragility of our democracy as something that “can be destroyed by a single zealous man who holds aloft a freedom sign while quietly undermining all of freedom’s cherished institutions.”
America has always managed to preserve democracy because of the focus on the concept of equality before the law and the right to have a say in our government.
We have come to a place where many of you are choosing to politicize the word democracy. If you see the word democracy as something partisan, you are simultaneously at war with both the Constitution and the truth.
The strength of American democracy lies in our capacity to design the future we desire. It does not imply agreement, but it does imply a willingness to defend one another’s right to participate in that democracy.
Claims that we are not a democracy covertly combine principles with minority rule in lieu of popular sovereignty. It is a perversion of our Constitution, not a feature, to allow for long-term minority rule at the federal level.
Every generation is tasked with the preservation and expansion of our democracy. Your support to destroy our system of government and to replace it with one based on minority rule is tragic.
[This was] a view Abraham Lincoln addressed in 1858 as he declared, “I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments … are the arguments kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. … Whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”
Matthew Douglas
Brooks, GA 30205
