At the end of the Constitutional Conventions that finally dictated the type, form, and nature of the government that was going to guide our new nation back in 1787, an anonymous woman is reported to have asked the inimitable Benjamin Franklin what kind of government he and his compatriots had formed – after all, the average people of the Colonies had little knowledge of what was transpiring behind those closed doors.
That man’s recorded words were nothing more than “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The very nature of a republic – and this country is a republic, not a democracy – is that the people elect representatives to voice their desires and opinions in the government… and thus lead the country. Unfortunately, I dare say Ben would be remarkably unimpressed with the nature and politics of the men we are electing to office, and through those elections – through those American citizens repeatedly putting the same corrupt, petty authoritarians into positions of power – his words are coming to fruition.
We are losing our republic.
However, lost cause though it may be, it is occasionally useful to remind people what should have happened over the past 225 years:
The Bill of Rights doesn’t grant privileges. It guarantees rights. The only granting is that of certain enumerated powers to the government. The government is not a parent. The government is not an ideal. It is a necessary evil. The government is not to be obeyed by the people. The government must obey the people. The people must respect the laws which fall within the enumerated powers of the government.
And that is the nature of a republic, my fellow Americans – we, the people, are in charge, and the government is only there because it absolutely has to be. We, the people, control what happens in our country, not a bunch of hopped-up, wanna-be totalitarians with delusions of standing. We, the people, have final say over what our government does, regardless of whatever rules, regulations, or limitations they attempt to impose upon us.
Our country was founded by a bunch of misfits, revolutionaries, troublemakers, and fighters, and that independent spirit has imbued the very fabric of America’s government from the very day it was created. Or, as the founding document of our great nation said:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
And, as our very own laws dictate:
No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law, and no courts are bound to enforce it.
Maybe one day the American people will remember all these things, in sufficient numbers to matter… but the pessimist in me thinks it will not be soon enough to make a difference.
I fear that to be the case as well. However bad things get, the founding fathers example is still there in our history. Someday, somewhere, some group of people will have the brains to follow the blueprint we foolishly abandoned. Maybe it will be some future generation in this country. At least I’d like to think so.
[...] but I didn’t really register how profound it is until this morning, when I saw that Linoge had it as his QOTD for yesterday. From Joe Huffman at The View From North Central Idaho, commenting on a different QOTD: The Bill of [...]
Oh, indeed, the document will live on, and maybe, sometime in the future, someone else will sit down and iron out the kinks we have discovered over the past 225 years… Probably not on the same soil, but maybe they will be successful where we were not.
But me, I am not holding out a whole lot of hope for this current “grand experiment”.
One can make an argument (a good one, I think) that we began losing the Republic as early as the first meeting of the Congress. It was definitely fading by the time of the Whiskey Rebellion, when Washington call out the militia to enforce a tax on those who arguably had little representation in its passing.
(Of course, he had to have been worried about the possible secession of those territories “beyond the mountains”, since he had some rather large land holdings there that might have disappeared if that had came to pass.)
Complaints about “The End of the Republic!” have been voiced many times in our history, not only at the Whiskey Rebellion, but around the time of the War Between the States, WWI and Roosevelt’s New Deal, to name a few off the top of my head. Those saying such things were “crackpots”, the equivalent to today’s “fringe elements”. They were few in number, if prescient, so they were easy enough to shrug off.
It’s just taken this long for it to become so utterly obvious that it couldn’t be ignored by the masses.
My big concern is this question: Have We The People become so somnambulistic under the twin onslaughts of The Major Media and government handouts that all we’re going to do is yell at the nearest spouse or kid to “Bring me ‘nother beer!” and go back to watch Dancing with American’s Next Top Drag Idol?
In a word, “Yes.”
At this point in time, I see absolutely no way we can salvage the American experiment, primarily because I do not see any cause for the Average American to expend the effort necessary to do so. The quote was originally attributed to democracies, but it has proven to hold true just the same for republics as well – once the people realize they can vote themselves money, it is all over.
And, yeah, there have been doomsayers since time immemorial… but, damnit, we are right this time! Wait…