Republic = Democracy

God made it easy, God made it easy on me
God laid his Es all on me
God makes it easy on me

some beautiful degenerate dance music for a Friday night from a couple of hooligan Mancunian brothers – no, not those guys

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I read Peggy Noonan's latest. She’s one of the members of the political class who every once in while shows she’s a lot smarter and more aware than she lets on in most of the drivel she produces. Here she writes about the similarities between Trump’s looming Iran fiasco and W’s past Iraq criminality.

Remember in 2016, Trump went into the South Carolina primary and said going into Iraq in 03 was the stupidest thing America ever did and W was an idiot. I think that’s pretty much verbatim. Unfortunately for the Rep establishment, they were to discover unlike with the Dems, moving the S. Carolina primary wasn't a way to stop insurgent candidates. All those once old-time Carolina Democrats, now voting Republicans, were a hotbed of discontent. Trump won going away.

So, here we are, no one was held accountable for the Iraq debacle, thus another stupidity, another idiot. If power is not held accountable, there is no republic, no democracy, no self-government. Which gets to a well confused Noonan statement in the piece, “We are not only a democracy, we are a republic; the legislative branch has a role.” Phew! No doubt provoking this confusion, somewhere deep in the back of her mind, is Madison’s Federalist creation of what is an historically indefensible difference between democracies and republics. Madison wrote in Federalist 14:

“It is, that in a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.”

That's an invention of James Madison. He offers no historical defense of this position because there isn't any. The republic that the founders were most familiar, and they were greatly familiar, was the first, Rome. In almost two-thousand years, there weren’t very many more republics between Caesar's coup and the US founding. Various places for a short period of time, most specifically in Renaissance Italy, called themselves republics, but you could argue about those self-designations. Just like today, where we have the People’s Republic of China or the Islamic Republic of Iran. Always found it amusing the mullahs of a reactionary theocracy would label themselves a republic, but then Islam, for the most part, was never anti-intellectual or closed to influence.

We do know the original republic, Rome, just as the original democracy, Athens, had participatory, not representative assemblies. However, democracy has a particular egalitarian notion, especially in regards to power, that many of those who drew up the US constitution at the end of the 18th century weren’t particularly comfortable with. They liked equating democracy with “the mob,” pointing to the last several decades of the Roman republic as example. It is true after centuries of exceptional republican rule, in the last decades, a good portion of Roman politics was the mob, though "mob-rule" led by Rome's patricians.

Many of America's constitutional structures were influenced by Rome, for example, presently relevant as Noonan states, only the Congress shall declare war, not the Executive. Just as relevant for today is Madison's call to protect against factions. In Federalist 10, he specifically promotes his ideas of republican structure as preventive against factions, though it has since proved lacking.

Madison writes,

“In the first place, it is to be remarked that, however small the republic may be, the representatives must be raised to a certain number, in order to guard against the cabals of a few.”

Well, if this were ever true, a century ago when we limited members in Congress to 435, we ended it as any sort of anti-cabal solution. Indeed, simultaneously, US cabals became incorporated, with an ever smaller handful since allowed to entirely dominate and control the political economy, thus the republic.

Madison took other ahistorical swipes against democracy including,

“Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

The Roman republic lasted almost five centuries. Democracy in Ancient Greece lasted two centuries, hardly “short in their lives.” Certainly, Roman democracy ended in an ocean of Roman blood, but that’s no different historically from any significant political change by whatever system of government. While in Greece, after two centuries, the always widely supported democracy was put to rest by Aristotle’s Macedonian pupil – let that be a lesson on schooling barbarians.

So, this is why Peggy Noonan’s confused. America’s secular political scripture, which has harmfully constrained American political thought for two centuries now, was from the get-go deliberately befuddled. One might think we live in radical, from the Latin “to the root,” political times, where we might initiate new beginnings. After all, just in the last two years, terms like democracy and republic have reentered the political lexicon to a far greater degree than any time previously in my life. Yet, it all has a greatly exhausted and reactionary feel, a politics not of citizens, only perpetrators, victims, and spectators.

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