If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

Thomas Jefferson

When defining democracy, and even when defining what type of government we have, people tend to get a little confused. I’ve been plenty of posters striving to find connections between our American system and that of and the Athenian democracy, and coming up bitter when they cast out their nets and catch nothing. This is not so much foolishness as a lack of knowledge that is available to you, with the advent of the mechanism by which we are speaking now. Contrary to popular belief the United States was not founded to be a democracy, but a republic.

Like Plato and Aristotle before him, Polybius, and his acquaintance, the great republican statesman Cicero, describe the Republic as the most evolved and ideal form of western government - not democracy. The system in Cicero’s Res publica (a work often considered derivative of Plato’s) explains the concept very well. Cicero’s Republic gives the most astounding example of the mixed constitutional system because it is actually the first example of a constitution. It demonstrates the same agreement between the three branches of government as did the Magna Carta and our own constitution.

Yes, our system is based on the Roman Republican system, and not Athenian democracy. In Athens, which remains the ideal example of a democratic city [(besides Rouseau’s mountaintop villages, and cockaroach hives, both of which fail to be cities) http://www.answers.com/topic/election], they considered elections a quality of oligarchy, not democracy. A number of notable Greeks, including philosophers like Socrates, who disagreed with the Athenian system, proponed a republic as more ideal.

Greeks like Polybius thought that it was the Roman system that made her superior enough to take over the Mediterranean. It was the Romans who had elections for important public offices, and theirs were notoriously stacked. Held only once a year, so that people from the countryside wouldn’t come in, even though their vote comprised the largest percentage of the comitia. The 51 states are divided unevenly in the senate, like the comita.

“In ancient democracy, as now, wealth made a difference to elections; people without money or family connections almost never won elective office in Athens. Because the Atheinas wanteed to curb the power of wealth, they severely restricted the powers of those who held elected office. So the representative bodies in Athens were filled not by elections, but by a lottery that drew from a large panel of citizens who had met certain conditions, and were drawn equally from the ten tribes (Paul Woodruff. First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea. Oxford UP: New York, 2005.).”

Your president wears the face for country to the world. although bush represents the interests of a group of oligarchical men, he nonetheless is the figurehead selected by them either for the most mass appeal. At a certain point one of the children of a former Republican president would be eligible for office, so in a way the mistakes of the previous decades are responsible for the mistakes of the current administration. Famous names like Regan, Schwarzenegger, Kennedy, Bush or Clinton and fat pockets win elections far faster than the merit of an enlightened mind.

Even as our collective consciousness continues to evolve, we have hardly begun to comprehend our own systems. “It is her spirit, customs and constitution that we are bound first to learn, both because she is the motherland of all of us, and because we must needs hold that wisdom as perfect went to the estabishment of her laws as to the acquisition of the vast might of her empire.” -De Oratore, I. xliv. 196If we’re going to have a democracy (which people seem to be clamouring for) then we’re going to have to do away with some aspects of our republic, like elections. If we’re going to have a republic, it should be recognized as such, and the newfound democratic power of the people (united at last by the internet) means democracy could finally take it’s part.