Apparently, our republic is "anti-democratic"

Every once in a while, I come across an opinion column that is so spectacularly wrong on so many levels, that after reading it, I feel depressed at the realization that there are people in our country who actually believe wholeheartedly in the writer's positions.

A column in the Forum section of the Sunday (31 Jan) Sacramento Bee that I suffered through is one of those instances. It was written by one Blair Bobier, the deputy director of a think tank in Washington D.C. called the New America Foundation. After reading his column, I thought that if what Mr. Bobier calls for is his idea of a New America, then I will stick with the Old America, thank you very much. I will quote from Mr. Bobier's column, but it will be very difficult to not post the entire text of the article, as he has that many ridiculous things to say.

The column, entitled Constitution's anti-democratic, outdated values in need of purge actually begins with a well-deserved criticism of California's constitution, which has been amended so many times by voter propositions, that it has become a riddle wrapped around a mystery inside an enigma and is currently the third-longest constitution in the world.

While I agree that California's constitution needs a major overhaul, Mr. Bobier's descriptions of the failings of our federal constitution is where he lost me. As I quote from his column, take note of how often he uses the word "democracy" or derivations thereof. For fun, I will highlight the times he uses that word. You, the reader, need to understand that our country's system of government is not a democracy and was never meant to be one. We are a republic, in which our rights are granted by God and protected by law (See the Declaration of Independence and Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution). In a democracy, your rights are granted by the majority, and they are at the whim of the majority. Not a place I would like to live, but it is what our country has devolved toward becoming, especially in the last eighty years or so.

Mr. Bobier's criticism of the U.S. Constitution begins with a channeling of the recently departed Howard Zinn:

The U.S. Constitution, a model of innovation at the time of its adoption, is similarly ill-suited to govern the lives of its increasingly diverse citizenry. Created by and for an exclusionary elitist society, the original Constitution established a government for a fledgling nation that was then a thin strip along the Eastern seaboard with a population of 2.5 million people. Not only did the original document enshrine slavery as an accepted practice, it crated a number of blatantly anti-democratic institutions.

I could write quite a lengthy blog post deconstructing just this paragraph, but we are only just getting started! The Constitution is ill-suited for our diverse citizenry, Mr. Bobier? You wouldn't be saying that the Constitution is only suited for white people would you, Sir? Are you saying that non-white races don't value freedom? I can only speculate, because Mr. Bobier doesn't explain what he means by "diverse." As for the expansion of our country beyond its original borders and population count, I just read an unrelated column today by Selwyn Duke that had a great line which instantly made me think of Mr. Bobier's ridiculous position. Mr. Duke said that truth transcends time, place, and people. The Constitution was written in 1787, with the Bill of Rights being added in 1791. The limits on government power, the descriptions on the role of government, and the prohibitions on the violation of our rights our just as relevant today as they were then, because the times may change, and technology may change, but human nature does not change. And if there ever is anything that absolutely needs to be changed or updated - and that need has occurred - the Constitution has an amendment process. After the Bill of Rights in 1791, the Constitution has been amended only 17 more times. Not bad. And no, the Constitution did not enshrine slavery as an accepted practice. If you actually read the document, you will see that slavery was merely tolerated, otherwise a lack of a compromise between the anti-slavery northern state delegates and the pro-slavery southern state delegates would most likely have sunk the whole 1787 Convention. See the 3/5 Compromise and the 1808 African slave trade compromise to see just how much opposition to slavery there really was.

Mr. Bobier continues:

In truth, [the Constitution never did belong to "We the People"]: the Declaration's pursuit of happiness was not meant to include people of color, women, and working-class citizens; all have been enfranchised, but only after years of struggle. Now the most dangerous threat to American democracy is the stubborn and misguided belief that we actually have one.

So in one breath, he says that everyone but white males was left out of the Declaration of Independence, but in the next breath, he admits that the problem has been rectified, although only after "years of struggle." Isn't that exactly the whole point? Through that trusty amendment process, those excluded groups gained their proper rights. And the way I figure, that struggle should make these groups appreciate their rights and political power all the more. And there Mr. Bobier goes, lamenting the democracy we supposedly no longer have, when we were never supposed to have one in the first place. Bravo, Sir.

After Mr. Bobier calls for restoring free speech by overturning the Supreme Court's recent decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which... restored people's free speech, he then goes into some strange territory:

...the Senate and the presidency must be transformed as democratic institutions. The Senate is remarkably unrepresentative: California's 38 million people have equal representation with the 500,000 residents of Wyoming. The composition of the Senate, the vestige of an ancient compromise related to the perpetuation of slavery, threatens any legitimate claims this country has to a democracy.

Seriously, this column actually ran in a major metropolitan newspaper! So now he wants to abolish the United States Senate? Now, I will be the first one to step up and say that most of our current Senators should be put out to pasture, but that has much to do with the fact that since 1913, the United States Senate has been more in line with a democracy that Mr. Bobier so obviously desires, rather than the republic we are supposed to have. Until 1913, our Senators were chosen by the state legislatures; not by popular vote. The House of Representatives represented the American people, and the Senate represented the states. The 17th Amendment changed all that by requiring Senators to be chosen by popular vote as well. So you got a huge chunk of what you want, Mr. Bobier, and yet you still complain.

Mr. Bobier's next target is the Electoral College system:

Like the Senate, the Electoral College is a historical anachronism born of horse-trading and expediency. Since its electoral formula is based, in part, on the composition of the Senate, it too, is unquestionably anti-democratic (boy, he really hates the Senate)... For now, suffice it to say that, at a minimum, [the president] should be elected by a majority vote of the people.

Again, if the United States were a democracy, then it would make more sense to scrap the Electoral College. But we are not a democracy. We are not a contiguous, borderless country; we are a collection of semi-autonomous, sovereign states. As such, the results of the presidential election are counted by states, not by the sheer number of national votes. I often use the World Series as a method of explaining the Electoral College to my 8th Grade U.S. History students. In the World Series, it doesn't matter how many runs you score, it only matters how many games you win. It is entirely possible to have a team score many more overall runs than the other team, but still lose the series; only the number of victorious games count. I think you can see the parallels with the Electoral College system. Winning more overall games shows a winning consistency that simply scoring a bunch of points in one particular game does not. This also hold true in a presidential election. It wouldn't make sense for someone to be elected president just because he got more overall popular votes thanks to some freakishly populated state that overpowered the votes in the rest of the country. Using sheer numbers, Wyoming's population represents just .013% of California's. However, when you compare Wyoming's 3 Electoral College votes, that gives it a more competitive .054% of California's total of 55.

Mr. Bobier ends his column with one more call for democracy:

Free speech for all (by taking it away), a representative government (by abolishing the Senate), and a democratically elected president (by abolishing the Electoral College): "The world's greatest democracy" should settle for nothing less.

This whole column was one gigantic straw man argument, where Mr. Bobier set up the notion that we are supposed to be a democracy and then knocked down some of the key institutions that are keeping us from being that democracy that he says that we are supposed to be. I will leave Mr. Bobier, and you my dear readers, with a little bit of wisdom on that subject from some of those elitist white guys about whom Mr. Bobier seems to think so little.

James Madison said in Federalist Number 10:

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

John Adams had this to say:

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

And leave it to Ben Franklin to make things really clear:

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!

And believe me, in a democracy, those wolves would also have voted to disarm the lamb! Let us thank God that we are still supposed to live in a republic, where our right to defend ourselves, and many other rights, belong to us because God gave them to us, and not because 50.1% of the people think we should or should not have them.

Good Day to You, Sir