A Look At America and Democracy.

     On July 4, 1776, the United States of America declared its independence from the tyranny of England. In May of 1787, the Founding Fathers began the drafting of The Constitution. This document is the supreme law of our country and is intended to guide our government; unfortunately, our government is moving farther and farther away from this idea and people are becoming less informed about it. One of the greatest and most prominent examples of this is the people’s belief that America is a pure democracy, and that democracy is great. In quite a few ways, they are very wrong. For one thing, the United States was founded as a federal constitutional republic, although a distant form of democracy, it was never as a pure democracy, as most would say and believe. In fact, the Founding Fathers repeatedly warned of the dangers of a pure democracy. In a federal constitutional republic, among other things, the people have certain, inalienable rights that, no matter what, cannot be voted out. With a pure democracy, as James Madison put it in The Federalist Papers, “there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention [and] have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” This means that there is no way to keep the people’s rights safe. In a pure democracy, if the majority of the people vote, for instance, to commit genocide upon a people then there is no way to stop it from happening. Many politicians consider our right to vote to be, as Senator John McCain stated, “the heart and soul of our democracy.” While this is mostly true for a pure democracy, he is wrong in stating that it is our most fundamental right. If that was, indeed, the most important and fundamental right and we did live in a pure democracy, then at any time the people could vote away our God-given (as the Founding Fathers put it) and inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and those assured us in The Bill of Rights. Another fallacy of a pure democracy is this; once the public realizes that it can vote itself entitlements from the rich and business owners, the incentive to produce rapidly disappears. How? Once the entitlements are put into place, business owners don’t want to produce because they barely receive any money from their hard work and then they have to pay those who don’t work, through their taxes. Soon, no one has a job and no one is getting income, not even the government. This is always the beginning of the end of any great nation. If the government keeps moving toward this mentality, then the United States would collapse, as all pure democracies eventually have throughout history. “Democracy yields Socialism, yields Communism, yields tyranny,” and soon after; the collapse of a great nation.

By Junior Robinson