Democracy of the Left

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.   - Alexis de Tocqueville

Athenian Democracy Politician Pericles giving a famous

speech Wikipedia photo

Politicians, their low information voters, and indoctrinated Millennials talk about our endangered democracy when their conservative opponents dare to contradict them. We know, however, that our country is a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy.

According to the legal dictionary, a constitutional republic consists of three branches, executive, judicial, and legislative which divide the power of the government equally, and the head of the state and other officials are elected by the country’s citizens to represent them.  As is often the case, these representatives, once elected, do not represent the interests of their constituents, of the American people, but their own and those of special interest groups who supported their candidacy.

Our country has a Constitution which limits the government’s power if it is followed. Unfortunately, over the years, it has been ignored and re-interpreted many times by the courts. The Supremes have construed our Constitution to mean something else at times in order to fit a pre-decided outcome, i.e., the Obamacare forced insurance which was deemed a tax by Justice Roberts.

Merriam-Webster defines democracy today as “a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives,” or “the practice or principles of social equality.”

Webster’s defined democracy in 1961 as “a form of government in which the supreme power is lodged in the people collectively.” But collectivism breeds communism and chaos.

In the actual etymological definition of democracy, it means “power of the people.” (demos, Greek for populace, and kratos, Greek for power, strength)

There were and are quite a few totalitarian states that used the word “democracy” or “democratic” in the name of their country, i.e., the German Democratic Republic, the former Soviet satellite nation that ruled its people with the help of the dreaded Stasi.

There was nothing democratic about this state and it was visibly obvious by the Berlin Wall built to keep the East Berliners trapped inside the socialist state, away from the free West Berliners.

The lesser known visually was the infamous Iron Curtain, an actual wall with barbed wire which ran for hundreds of miles the length of the former German Democratic Republic. The watch towers made sure any citizen trying to flee, who was not blown up by the land mines placed strategically around the wall, was shot by soldiers armed with machine guns.

Stalin wrote that “There have been times in the history of our Party [Communist] when the opinion of the majority or the momentary interests of the Party conflicted with the fundamental interests of the proletariat. On such occasions Lenin would never hesitate and resolutely took his stand on principle against the majority of the Party…” In other words, he became the benevolent dictator because he knew best what people wanted.

Lenin was clearer, “Soviet socialist democracy is in no way contradictory to one-man rule and dictatorship, a dictator sometimes fulfills the will of the class.”

In communist rhetoric and semantics, Democracy is a very essential word. Communist nations are ‘people’s democratic republics.’ The communist party declares arrogantly that 98 percent or more of its people show up to vote, approving of the communist regime. Never mind that people were forced by fear of disloyalty charges to come to the precinct to vote and that there was only one candidate on the ballot, such candidate having been approved by the communist party and thus having no power to change anything.

Khrushchev had his own definition of democracy – he drew a parallel between “bourgeois democracy” and “people’s democracy.” In the people’s democracy, the electorate and their representatives are entirely beholden to the communist party leaders, the proletariat, peasants, and intellectuals. In the bourgeois democracy, he said, the representatives serve lawyers, bankers, consortiums, monopolies, members of boards, leading corporations, etc.

He said, “Bourgeois democracy is the democracy of the rich. Under it the popular masses are pushed aside from administration; the popular masses cannot take part in the discussion and decision of social and political questions concerning the people as a whole. Thousands of obstacles are raised before the working class of the capitalist countries in order to prevent any of the workers from getting into Parliament or Congress….” (Conquest Without War, 1961, p. 372)

According to socialists/communists the one-party state serves the interests of the proletariat best. (See the disaster that is California, a one-party state) Socialists believe that “Only in undemocratic countries do several parties exist.”

Lenin believed that “The state belongs to the sphere of coercion. It would be madness to renounce coercion, particularly in the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Stalin explained that under the dictatorship of the proletariat the bourgeoisie would have no universal freedom, no freedom of speech, press, assembly. The state would grant maximum of freedom to the “proletarian strata in town and country and deny even a minimum of freedom to the remnants of the bourgeoisie.”

The dictatorship of the proletariat was “the working-class leadership in the struggle to overthrow the power of capital, to win and consolidate people’s government and build a communist society.” (p. 377)

The Soviet Bolsheviks stated that “It was precisely socialist democracy that enabled the Soviet people to get rid of such ‘freedoms’ as the right to choose one’s exploiter or to be unemployed, the right to starve or to be a hired slave to capital.”

I do remember being extremely hungry under Ceausescu’s socialist democracy and standing in long food lines daily in order to avoid starvation. I am extremely glad that I can choose my employer under capitalism, that there is capital to start new businesses, and there are entrepreneurs with ideas, who know how to start a new enterprise that would hire employees to do the job necessary, not a communist community organizer who has never created anything useful in society except empty words and chaos.

The Bolsheviks described themselves as the defenders of the poor and of the downtrodden. It is how Socialist Democrats portray themselves today.

Alexis de Tocqueville said, “Despotism often presents itself as the repairer of all the ills suffered, the support of just rights, defender of the oppressed, and founder of order.” Millions of survivors of communism would agree with Tocqueville and 100 million of victims of communism validate his assessment.

When Hugo Chavez, the former socialist dictator of Venezuela, cracked down on protesters against his regime, George Ciccariello-Maher, then a professor at Drexel University, defended the state violence against its protesting people as “a radically democratic brutality and dictatorship of the wretched of the earth.”

Rand Paul wrote in his book, The Case Against Socialism, “Oh my… ‘egalitarian brutality’… ‘democratic brutality’ - so much for democratic elections restraining the excesses of socialism.” According to Paul, Ciccariello-Maher tweeted infamously, “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide” and doubled down on his outrageous statement with the explanation “when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing.” (p. 13)

The rhetoric of Socialist Democracy promoted by Bernie Sanders and his pupil, AOC, is growing shriller on the socialist-dominated media’s talking points. It is a rhetoric inflated by ignorance and lack of historical knowledge. Sanders calls for a “higher path, a path of compassion, justice, and love.” He calls it democratic socialism. Is this justice delivered by black-clad Antifa thugs with baseball bats?

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” Democrats include in this redistribution of wealth scheme every illegal who walks across our borders, to the detriment of our own citizens, their children, and grandchildren.

Call it what you may, what Democrats and their ignorant followers want through democratic socialism is plain redistribution of wealth, stealing from those who earned it and giving it to those who did not, forced global equality through government theft - not just through excessive taxation but also through theft of private property.

Democrat socialists also want the erasure of our borders, the destruction of our sovereignty. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 provided the basis of the modern state system and of the concept of territorial sovereignty. The treaty brought an end to endless European wars between different factions and principalities.

As Tocqueville said, “Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom… The subjection of individuals will increase amongst democratic nations, not only in the same proportion as their equality, but in the same proportion as their ignorance.”

Note: If you research Athenian democracy on Wikipedia, you will find 48 different types of democracies – anticipatory, Athenian, authoritarian, cellular, consensus, cosmopolitan, defensive, deliberative, direct, economic, electronic, empowered, ethnic, grassroots, guided, inclusive, industrial, interactive, Jacksonian, liberal, illiberal, liquid, media, multiparty, new, non-partisan, participatory, people’s, pluralist, popular, radical, representative, religious, Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Mormon, sectarian, semi, semi-direct, social, socialist, sovereign, Soviet, substantive, totalitarian, and workplace.