The story is often told about how Big Ben Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention and was asked by a woman bystander what kind of government the people had been given. “A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” he is supposed to have said. That story is used to remind us how we have to be diligent to make sure that we do not cede away the power of the people and lose our democracy.
But maybe that’s not really what Benny meant. He didn’t say, “democracy.” He said, “republic.” That’s a very different thing.
Don’t take my word for it (I seldom take my word for anything myself). Listen to a guy who knows – a guy who was there with Benny when the whole thing started – James Madison. Jimmy said, “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. Benny and Jimmy didn’t entirely trust “the people.” Do we have any more reason to trust them now?
Now I am avidly Democratic (capital “D”). The idea of supporting Republicans (capital “R”), especially today’s Republicans, is abhorrent to me. But if you drop the capital letters, I find myself increasingly more republican than democratic. I side with Benny and Jimmy. We have increasingly “reformed” our system to become more democratic – giving more power to the people. How’s that workin’ out? I’ll tell ya’ – the populist elections of the Orange Menace and his troops.
This is not intended as an elitist screed. When I say that giving more power to the people themselves has been damaging, I include myself among the people. The world is an increasingly complicated place. I follow the news. I try to stay informed, but don’t ask me how to solve the problems in the Middle East or in Ukraine, or in South Sudan. Shit, I’m not even sure where South Sudan is.
And I not only have no idea how to solve many of the problems we now face, but in a lot of ways, I have trouble telling you what they are. What is crypto-currency and is it a good thing or a bad thing? Is Artificial Intelligence dangerous or wonderful? Will my grandchild be able to clone the baby of her choice, and if she can, what the fuck will that mean?
Toss social media and the proliferation of information into that maelstrom of confusion. Some say that’s a good thing. The people can be better informed. I take the opposite view. Because there is no filter on the information we receive, we have no idea what to believe. The populists take advantage of that opportunity and feed us their propaganda (read “lies”). And they are very good at it. They don’t just say black is white, something easily disprovable. They lie with both subtlety and frequency. Their lies make fact-checkers take more time to disprove them than we have the time to consider them. In this complicated world where so many of us have so many other things to think about, the lies become facts, and those “facts” are what we are left to base our votes on.
So, the more “democratic” we get, the more many of our votes are based on either lies or confusion or unavoidable ignorance or all of the above. That doesn’t seem to me like a good way to govern.
Benny and Jimmy and their buddies created a system that gave the people powers they had never had before. But they cabined that power with a lot of limitations, many more than we have today. Yes, some of those limitations were based on race and gender and I am certainly not advocating that they be restored. There were other limitations, though, that we have also done away with but that might be worth re-considering. None more than in how we choose out leaders.
Originally, the Constitution did not allow “the people” to elect either their Senators or their President. Senators were chosen by the members of the State Legislatures. This removed by one step the power of the regular citizen to decide who they wanted. That choice was filtered through a group believed to be a little better informed. Same with President. We all now condemn the Electoral College because it’s so “undemocratic.” Well, that was the whole point. When it was created, the Electoral College was intended as a filter just like the Legislature’s election of Senators was.
I’m not saying we should restore those very limitations. I’m not sure I want my state legislators deciding on anything more than they have to. But is it so crazy to think about what other kinds of filters we can place between we the uninformed and the important choices that in a “democratic” system we need to make. For example, we don’t let people become citizens without testing them on their basic knowledge of our government. Hell, we don’t even let people drive without testing them for at least a basic knowledge of the rules of the road. Would it be so bad to test voters for whether they have a clue about what they are about to do when they get into the booth?
Maybe that will get us closer to the “republic” that Benny was talking about.
We were right 