I have been wanting to write a diary on this subject for more than a week — but I was finally convinced to do it today after reading the DK diary by Ian Reifowitz. Reifowitz points out that many Trumpists (e.g., Michael Flynn) believe a dangerous lie that America was never a democracy — they believe it was always a republic and that the two are incompatible with each other.
Reifowitz coined an acronym for this belief — RNAD, ”republic, not a democracy”. Unfortunately, his description isn’t complete, and the missing stuff is historically very significant.
Reifowitz does call attention to a 2020 article published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and his critique of that propaganda piece is spot-on. Here are the three self-proclaimed “take-away” bullets from the Heritage piece (emphasis and comments in angle-brackets are mine):
- Republican institutions refine views, apply a brake to impetuous decisions, inject reason into impassioned debates, and help make far-sighted decisions.
- <It’s asinine to conclude that the do-nothing Republicans in the last 7 or 8 Congresses are injecting reason into debates! They are just gumming up the works so their plutocrat benefactors aren’t hit with higher taxes.>
- Republicanism depends on a plurality of factions to govern, which resist the demand for more equality and more democracy in all things.
- <Possibly, this is referring to the Senate’s filibuster rule, which is certainly anti-democratic. If not, the bullet is meaningless. All parties hope their factions (e.g., blue progressives and blue moderates) will come together and form a “big tent”.>
- Egalitarianism threatens our republic by undermining the social, familial, religious, and economic distinctions and inequalities that undergird our liberty.
- <This is the crux of what separated American Republicans from American Democrats from WWII to 9/11. Republicans are in favor of accentuating inequalities by giving more power to oligarchs. Democrats are in favor of reducing inequalities by taxing plutocrats and creating minimum standards for votoing, employment opportunit, citizen welfare, etc. How stonewalling popular legislation contributes to individual liberty is anyone’s guess.> (Unfortunately the last two open circle bullets vaporized when I published the article. Let’s hope they stay here when I republish it. This is kind of embarrassing that I can’t get the format to stay correct.)
Open-circle #2 Possibly, this is referring to the Senate’s filibuster rule, which is certainly anti-democratic. If not, the bullet is meaningless. All parties hope their factions (e.g. blue progressives and blue moderates) will come together to form a “big tent”.
Open-circle #3 This is the crux of what separated American Republicans from American Democrats from WWII to 9/11. Republicans are in favor of accentuating inequalities by giving more power to oligarchs. Democrats are in favor of reducing inequalities by taxing plutocrats and creating minimum standards for voting, employment opportunities, citizen welfare, etc. How stonewalling popular legislation contributes to individual liberty is anyone’s guess.
Heritage (along with the Federalist Society) has been trying to fool people into believing that democracy (the governing concept) is fundmentally inferior to republicanism (the governing concept). The Heritage bullets above are all about political philosophy of the former Republican party (before it became the Trumpist party). They have nothing to do with democracy or republicanism, the governing concepts that establish the rules how a government can be of the people and by the people — in order to be ultimately for the people.
The only valid reasons America is not a pure democracy are: (a) it’s impractical to have national elections (popular votes involving more than 100 million deciders) as frequently as our state and federal goverment representatives have votes (legislative votes involving a few hundred deciders) hundreds of times per year in each institution; and (b) with legislators chosen by the people for terms of two to six years, the expectation (or more correctly, the hope) is that the institutional norms will temper the fever of the few angry populists who may join the legislature each new term — as compared to millions of voters, many of whose views may be less historically-based, and whose decision making processes may be much more prone to corruption and inflamation by short-term thinking demagogues.
Reifowitz points to the 1964 election as the origin of the RNAD argument, but it’s actually been around since the founding. For an excellent book on the subject, see S.H. Beer, To Make A Nation: The Rediscovery of American Federalism; Harvard Press, 1993.
Beer points out that federalism is actually what today’s Democratic party aspires to practice (as it has done since FDR’s presidency). Federalism, to the minds of Washington, Hamilton, and even Madison, was the view that the federal government is crucial to keeping the various states and viewpoints relatively unified, and thereby tamping down the tendency for the nation to disintegrate due to factions (political parties).
Hamilton was probably the best example of a federalist. He wanted a federal government that was large enough to (a) stabilize the national currency, (b) defend the nation against agressors, and (c) enforce the rights of ALL the people — especially political minorities who might be subject to bias and unequal treatment by rogue state governments who wanted to usurp the federal government’s power to protect the individual rights enumerated in the Constitution.
The chart reproduced at the top of this diary shows the sequence of presidential elections and the winning political parties since 1788. We see that John Adams was the only president who was a member of the Federalist party, and that the next four presidents were from the Democratic-Republican party.
The point here is to be sure we properly differentiate the party names from the governing concepts. The governing concept established by our constitution is a democratic-republican one. The laws are passed by elected representatives (republican) who are accountable to the people in democratic elections, and POTUS and SCOTUS use the enacted laws to protect people from being harmed by unscrupulous shysters, power-hungry local chieftans, and capitalists with their thumb on the scale.
The founding fathers argued about how much power the federal government should have and those arguments are still valid to this day. But they never would have disputed the idea that the federal government should be the ultimate arbiter and enforcer of constitutional rights, nor would they ever have supported the idea that it’s ok to disenfranchise some voters because of their political philosophy (like Trumpists want to do).
Not one of the founding fathers was anti-democratic (as long as we can temporarily ignore their decision to disenfranchise slaves, women, and non-landed persons). They were worried about cheaters and liars like Trump holding power due to an electorate that had lost its way, but they had faith that voters would reject candidates who had autocratic tendencies like King George III.
Beer cites Hamilton’s sentiments about the role of the federal government in American life.
The economy (Hamilton) foresaw would be free, individualistic, and competitive. The federal government, however, would take action to make it more likely that entrepreneurs invested their money in ways most advantageous to the national welfare. … There would be be federal inspections of manufactured goods to protect the consumer and to enhance the reputation of American goods in foreign markets. The purpose (of these government interventions) was to make the country rich and powerful. The outcome … would be to make the United States “one nation, indivisible, bound together by common wants, common interests, and common prosperity.
Regarding the “independent state legislature” theory that power-craving Republicans have drooled over since Chief Justice Rehnquist introduced the concept in his Bush v Gore decision, Beer has a very clear take on that nonsense (even though his book predates the 2000 election).
He cites McCulloch v Maryland (1819), a case in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress had the power to incorporate a federally-established bank and that Maryland could not tax such an entity that was established by the federal government specifically to execute the federal government’s constitutional powers. During that case, the anti-federalists (those who opposed federally-operated banks in the name of “state’s rights”), advanced a theory that the U.S. Constitution was a compact established by a group of sovereign states (the Compact Theory of political philosophy) and that SCOTUS should safeguard state power over federal power.
This “states’ rights” notion survives today in the “independent state legislature” theory, which is a blatant attempt to de-federalize the U.S. government’s control (and even state courts’ control) over the standards by which national elections should be carried out. Its echoes also linger in the Dobbs decision and others where the radical SCOTUS majority want to disassemble much of the regulatory power of the federal government.
If readers were ever fuzzy about who established the U.S. Consitution, the answer, as Beer reminds us, can be found in the preamble:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
All along, Hamilton was correct and the states’ rights whiners have been utterly wrong.
It may be normal for Republican and Democrat polticians to argue about the relative roles of state and federal governments, but no one should be buffaloed by the nonsense that the federal government is inferior (and subservient) to the individual state governments.
We must say no to the Heritage Foundation — we do not have a “republican” form of goverment.
We must never forget that our form of government is democratic-republican, and our Constitution was established by “We the People”.
That’s why the “democratic” part comes first in the hyphenated moniker, and why we should never be confused or shy about calling our manner of governing a democratic one.