Phony Democracy Panic Monday Open Commentary

Fake Democracies ? Are We a Republic or Not  ?

James Hankins is a professor of History at Harvard University* and a Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. His most recent books are Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy.

*Please don’t hold this against him.  Hankins is on our side.

In an essay recently published in The Free Press, the political commentator Martin Gurri made a nicely arch response to the fashionable hand-wringing about supposed threats to “our democracy.”

“I come with good news. We can’t lose our democracy because we never had one. Our system is called “representative government.” It enjoys brief spasms of democratic involvement—elections, trials by jury—but by and large it glories in being densely and opaquely mediated, and many of its operations are patently undemocratic—appointed judges, for example, or the Electoral College. This is a feature, not a bug, of the system. By making sure the right hand of power seldom knows what the left hand is doing, the Framers sought to prevent various flavors of tyranny—including, in James Madison’s words, ‘an unjust combination of the majority.’”

and,

So shallow is knowledge of history among our politicians, journalists, and the political nation in general that most would struggle to describe the difference between a republic and a ham sandwich. Heedless of capitalization, they would inevitably associate it with the name of one of our political parties, whose structure is no more republican than the Democratic Party’s organs are democratic.

this also,

So what understandings of the term “republic” might they have gleaned from their reading? First of all they would be aware, like Gurri, that a republic is not a democracy. (This is not as obvious as it seems: I remember a student— a Harvard history major!—writing on an exam I gave some years ago that “republic is just an old name for democracy.”) The Founders knew what a democracy was and had no interest in giving America a democratic constitution. They knew their history. As John Adams wrote in a letter to John Taylor in 1814, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

and in the spirit of the more things, the more they stay the same….

Post-classical Athenians, by contrast, continued to call their city-state a democracy even after all the real power came to be exercised behind the scenes by wealthy oligarchs. The great authority on Hellenistic Greece, Peter Green, once wittily remarked that Athenians came to see democracy as a privilege best restricted to the upper classes. Modern parallels spring to mind. The Romans for their part were not in the least embarrassed about the preponderant power of the wealthy in their system. It was a feature, not a bug. But in Rome, the possession of wealth and preponderant power imposed upon the great the responsibility to put themselves and their treasure at the service of the republic. It was assumed that the wealthy would also be the best educated, the most likely to have experience in civil and military affairs, and, as persons of long residence in Rome, the most loyal and public-spirited.

You know what to do.