The deliberations of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were held in strict secrecy. Consequently, anxious citizens gathered outside Independence Hall when the proceedings concluded in guild to learn what had been produced backside closed doors. The answer was provided immediately. A Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have nosotros got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, "A republic, if you lot can go along it."

This substitution was recorded past Constitution signer James McHenry in a diary entry that was later reproduced in the 1906 American Historical Review. Yet in more than recent years, Franklin has occassionally been misquoted as having said, "A democracy, if you can keep information technology." The NRA's Charleton Heston quoted Franklin this fashion, for case, in a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace that was aired on Dec 20, 1998.

This misquote is a serious one, since the difference betwixt a democracy and a republic is not merely a question of semantics but is central. The word "democracy" comes from the Latin res publica — which means merely "the public thing(southward)," or more than simply "the law(s)." "Democracy," on the other hand, is derived from the Greek words demos and kratein, which translates to "the people to dominion." Republic, therefore, has e'er been synonymous with majority rule.

The Founding Fathers supported the view that (in the words of the Declaration of Independence) "Men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." They recognized that such rights should non exist violated by an unrestrained majority any more than than they should be violated by an unrestrained male monarch or monarch. In fact, they recognized that majority rule would quickly degenerate into mobocracy and then into tyranny. They had studied the history of both the Greek democracies and the Roman democracy. They had a clear agreement of the relative liberty and stability that had characterized the latter, and of the strife and turmoil — rapidly followed past despotism — that had characterized the former. In drafting the Constitution, they created a regime of constabulary and not of men, a commonwealth and not a democracy.

Just don't take our word for it! Consider the words of the Founding Fathers themselves, who — ane afterward another — condemned commonwealth.

• Virginia'due south Edmund Randolph participated in the 1787 convention. Demonstrating a clear grasp of republic's inherent dangers, he reminded his colleagues during the early weeks of the Constitutional Convention that the purpose for which they had gathered was "to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every human had found information technology in the turbulence and trials of republic…."

• John Adams, a signer of the Announcement of Independence, championed the new Constitution in his state precisely because it would non create a commonwealth. "Democracy never lasts long," he noted. "It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself." He insisted, "There was never a democracy that 'did not commit suicide.'"

• New York'due south Alexander Hamilton, in a June 21, 1788 speech urging ratification of the Constitution in his country, thundered: "It has been observed that a pure democracy if information technology were practicable would be the well-nigh perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more than faux than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed 1 good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity." Earlier, at the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton stated: "We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Commonwealth."

• James Madison, who is rightly known as the "Father of the Constitution," wrote in The Federalist, No. 10: "… democracies have e'er been glasses of turbulence and contention; take ever been institute incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and accept in general been equally short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths." The Federalist Papers, call up, were written during the time of the ratification debate to encourage the citizens of New York to support the new Constitution.

• George Washington, who had presided over the Constitutional Convention and later accepted the honor of existence chosen equally the first President of the United States under its new Constitution, indicated during his inaugural address on April xxx, 1789, that he would dedicate himself to "the preservation … of the republican model of government."

• Fisher Ames served in the U.Southward. Congress during the 8 years of George Washington'due south presidency. A prominent member of the Massachusetts convention that ratified the Constitution for that land, he termed democracy "a government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices and ambitions of their leaders." On another occasion, he labeled democracy's majority rule one of "the intermediate stages towards … tyranny." He later opined: "Democracy, in its best land, is only the politics of Clamor; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, merely when it breaks loose, information technology kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes." And in an essay entitled The Mire of Commonwealth, he wrote that the framers of the Constitution "intended our government should exist a republic, which differs more widely from a republic than a democracy from a despotism."

In light of the Founders' view on the subject area of republics and democracies, it is not surprising that the Constitution does not incorporate the give-and-take "democracy," but does mandate: "The United States shall guarantee to every Land in this Union a republican form of government."

20th Century Changes

These principles were once widely understood. In the 19th century, many of the neat leaders, both in America and away, stood in agreement with the Founding Fathers. John Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835 echoed the sentiments of Fisher Ames. "Between a counterbalanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between club and chaos," he wrote. American poet James Russell Lowell warned that "commonwealth gives every man the right to be his ain oppressor." Lowell was joined in his disdain for republic past Ralph Waldo Emerson, who remarked that "democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors." Beyond the Atlantic, British statesman Thomas Babington Macauly agreed with the Americans. "I accept long been convinced," he said, "that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or afterward, destroy liberty or civilization, or both." Britons Benjamin Disraeli and Herbert Spencer would certainly agree with their countryman, Lord Acton, who wrote: "The one prevailing evil of democracy is the tyranny of the bulk, or rather that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections."

Past the 20th century, notwithstanding, the falsehoods that democracy was the epitome of good government and that the Founding Fathers had established just such a government for the U.s. became increasingly widespread. This misinformation was fueled by President Woodrow Wilson's famous 1916 appeal that our nation enter Globe War I "to make the world rubber for democracy" — and by President Franklin Roosevelt'due south 1940 exhortation that America "must be the great arsenal of democracy" past rushing to England'southward assist during WWII.

Ane indicator of the radical transformation that took identify is the contrast betwixt the War Section'due south 1928 "Training Transmission No. 2000-25," which was intended for use in citizenship training, and what followed. The 1928 U.S. government document correctly defined democracy as:

A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or whatsoever other course of "direct expression." Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward holding is communistic — negating property rights. Mental attitude of the police force is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation or governed past passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.

This manual also accurately stated that the framers of the Constitution "made a very marked distinction between a republic and a commonwealth … and said repeatedly and emphatically that they had formed a republic."

But by 1932, pressure confronting its utilise caused it to be withdrawn. In 1936, Senator Homer Truett Bone (D-WA) took to the floor of the Senate to call for the document's complete repudiation. Past and so, even finding a copy of the manual had become well-nigh impossible. Decades later, in an article appearing in the Oct 1973 issue of Military Review, Lieutenant Colonel Paul B. Parham explained that the Regular army ceased using the manual because of letters of protest "from private citizens." Interestingly, Parham as well noted that the word democracy "appears on i hand to be of key importance to, and holds some peculiar significance for, the Communists."

Past 1952 the U.S. Army was singing the praises of democracy, instead of warning against information technology, in Field Manual 21-13, entitled The Soldier's Guide. This new manual incorrectly stated: "Because the Us is a democracy, the majority of the people decide how our Government will exist organized and run…." (Emphasis in original.)

Yet important voices connected to warn against the siren vocal for commonwealth. In 1931, England'due south Duke of Northumberland issued a booklet entitled The History of World Revolution in which he stated: "The adoption of Commonwealth as a grade of Regime by all European nations is fatal to adept Government, to liberty, to constabulary and society, to respect for potency, and to religion, and must eventually produce a country of chaos from which a new world tyranny will arise."

In 1939, historians Charles and Mary Bristles added their strong voices in favor of historical accurateness in their America in Midpassage: "At no fourth dimension, at no place, in solemn convention assembled, through no called agents, had the American people officially proclaimed the U.s. to be a democracy. The Constitution did non contain the discussion or any discussion lending eyebrow to information technology, except possibly the mention of 'We, the People,' in the preamble…. When the Constitution was framed no respectable person called himself or herself a democrat."

During the 1950s, Clarence Manion, the dean of Notre Dame Law Schoolhouse, echoed and amplified what the Beards had and then correctly stated. He summarized: "The honest and serious educatee of American history will recollect that our Founding Fathers managed to write both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution without using the term 'democracy' even once. No part of any of the existing state Constitutions contains any reference to the word. [The men] who were most influential in the institution and formulation of our government refer to 'democracy' just to distinguish it sharply from the republican course of our American Constitutional system."

On September 17 (Constitution Day), 1961, John Birch Society founder Robert Welch delivered an important speech, entitled "Republics and Democracies," in which he proclaimed: "This is a Republic, not a Democracy. Let's keep it that way!" The oral communication, which was after published and widely distributed in pamphlet form, amounted to a jolting wake-up call for many Americans. In his remarks, Welch not merely presented the evidence to show that the Founding Fathers had established a democracy and had condemned democracy, only he warned that the definitions had been distorted, and that powerful forces were at work to convert the American republic into a republic, in order to bring about dictatorship.

Means to an End

Welch understood that democracy is not an end in itself only a means to an end. Eighteenth century historian Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, it is thought, argued that, "A democracy cannot be as a permanent form of government. It can simply exist until the voters find that they tin vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy e'er collapses over loose financial policy, always followed by a dictatorship." And as British writer M.M. Chesterton put it in the 20th century: "You lot can never accept a revolution in order to plant a commonwealth. You must have a democracy in lodge to have a revolution."

Communist revolutionary Karl Marx understood this principle all too well. Which is why, in The Communist Manifesto, this enemy of freedom stated that "the showtime step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling form, to win the battle of democracy." For what purpose? To "abolish private belongings"; to "wrest, by degrees, capital letter from the bourgeoisie"; to "centralize all instruments of production in the easily of the Land"; etc.

Some other champion of democracy was Communist Mao Tse-tung, who proclaimed in 1939 (a decade earlier consolidating control on the Chinese mainland): "Taken every bit a whole, the Chinese revolutionary movement led by the Communist Political party embraces the two stages, i.e., the democratic and the socialist revolutions, which are substantially different revolutionary processes, and the second process can exist carried through only after the first has been completed. The autonomous revolution is the necessary preparation for the socialist revolution, and the socialist revolution is the inevitable sequel to the democratic revolution. The ultimate aim for which all communists strive is to bring about a socialist and communist society."

All the same another champion of democracy is Mikhail Gorbachev, who stated in his 1987 book Perestroika that, "co-ordinate to Lenin, socialism and commonwealth are indivisible…. The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with commonwealth [emphasis in the original] and revives the Leninist concept…. We want more than socialism and, therefore, more than democracy."

This socialist revolution has been underway in America for generations. In January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson boasted in a White House address: "We are going to try to take all of the coin that we think is unnecessarily beingness spent and take information technology from the 'haves' and requite it to the 'have nots' that need information technology so much." What he advocated, of class, was a Marxist, not an American, precept. (The way Marx put it was: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.") But other presidents before and after have advanced the same goal. Of course, well-nigh who support this goal do non encompass the totalitarian consequences of constantly transferring more ability to Washington. But this lack of understanding is what makes revolution by the ballot box possible.

The push for republic has but been possible considering the Constitution is being ignored, violated, and circumvented. The Constitution defines and limits the powers of the federal government. Those powers, all of which are enumerated, do not include agricultural subsidy programs, housing programs, education assistance programs, food stamps, etc. Under the Constitution, Congress is not authorized to pass any law it chooses; it is only authorized to pass laws that are constitutional. Anybody who doubts the intent of the Founders to restrict federal powers, and thereby protect the rights of the individual, should review the language in the Beak of Rights, including the opening phrase of the Get-go Subpoena ("Congress shall brand no police force…").

As Welch explained in his 1961 speech communication:

… homo has sure unalienable rights which practise not derive from government at all…. And those … rights cannot be abrogated by the vote of a majority any more than than they can by the prescript of a conqueror. The idea that the vote of a people, no matter how almost unanimous, makes or creates or determines what is right or merely becomes as absurd and unacceptable as the idea that right and justice are simply whatever a king says they are. But equally the early Greeks learned to endeavor to accept their rulers and themselves abide by the laws they had themselves established, so man has now been painfully learning that in that location are more than permanent and lasting laws which cannot be changed by either sovereign kings or sovereign people, but which must be observed by both. And that regime is merely a convenience, superimposed on Divine Commandments and on the natural laws that flow only from the Creator of homo and man'southward universe.

Such is the noble purpose of the ramble republic we inherited from our Founding Fathers.

This article, slightly revised, originally appeared in the November half dozen, 2000 upshot of The New American.

Photograph: AP Images