Mike Walsh pisses all over the misbegotten, disingenuous shitlib shibboleth of “Our Sacred Democracy” via a history lesson.
A republic is a form of government in which voting citizens elect representatives to small political bodies in order to vote on matters of civic interest or concern on behalf of the citizenry. The Romans, for example, were ruled in their Republic by a pair of consuls, serving simultaneously for a one-year term, and a senate composed of mostly wealthy men, usually aristocrats. There was also a host of lesser officers, including praetors, questors, aediles, etc. There was even an unwritten but constitutional provision for the office of Dictator in times of civic or national crisis.
Tribunes, who could be elected by the people or appointed by the consuls, represented the common folk, and had veto power over legislation. but overall the votes of the propertied classes and equestrians had a greater weight than those of the lower classes. Women, although citizens, were not allowed to vote or hold office; instead, their political power was wielded behind the scenes. A Roman politician could go very far as long as his wife’s fingerprints were on the knife.
The Roman way may not be to modern tastes, but it worked from the expulsion of the Tarquins in 509 B.C. (the last kings of Rome) up to the assassination of Caesar in 44 B.C. (His dictatorship-for-life only lasted a month.) Caesar’s death at the hands of his political opponents in the senate came at the end of a half-century of civil war during which time Rome’s empire had outgrown the capacity of its political system to effectively govern it. Further, the increasing aggrandizement of personal wealth via military conquest in effect produced large private armies that were set against each other until the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., in which Antony and Cleopatra were defeated by Octavian, soon to become Caesar Augustus, the first emperor. After all, Caesar conquered Gaul not because Rome asked him to, but because he needed the money.
As monarchy gradually made way for various forms of republicanism, at no time was a plebiscitary democracy—a society in which every man, woman, and child got a vote—ever envisaged. There was no enumerated “right” to vote in the Constitution; the qualifications were largely left up to the states, which set minimum ages for voting in their own elections. Early on, for example, the original 13 colonies each had some sort of property qualification for male voters, and by the time the national constitution was ratified in 1789, free black men of property could vote in some jurisdictions. But as the Civil War loomed, and Southern Democrat animosity toward Africans hardened, black men had been stripped of voting privileges, and only got them back with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment under Republican president Ulysses S. Grant in 1870.
…Madison has, of course, been proven right. From the time of ancient Athens and the Roman Republic, no sane system of government ever afforded the franchise universally and uncritically. Today, as the chief advocates for the craze of egalitarianism in all things, the Left speaks of the franchise in religious terms, as a “sacred right,” which is rich coming from them, since the only thing they currently hold sacred apparently is their right to contract monkeypox without social disapproval in their continuing pursuit of Dionysian sexual excess.
Just how badly the universal franchise has turned out can be seen in this current moment of our electoral politics. Chaotic elections in 2000, 2016, and 2020 have become the new normal. The Left howls about “disenfranchisement” even as it tears down all legal restrictions on untrammeled voting, most notably attacking the role of the states in determining eligibility (an authority that, as noted, goes back to the founding of the country) and relentlessly gutting protections against voter fraud.
And yet despite its ready availability, the vote seems not highly prized by the public, where it is routinely met by indifference by half the population.
Probably because a goodly portion of them long ago recognized American national “elections” as the insultingly-bad theater production they’ve long since been reduced to: easily tampered with; falsely promoted as “free and fair,” not perfect, but in the main reliable and above-board; the exclusive preserve of Uniparty candidates, which is deceitfully hyped as being a “two-party system.”
In recent years, it has come to matter less and less whether the President is a Dem or a Repub: either way, the government gets bigger, more powerful, and more meddlesome; freedom shrivels as corruption metastisizes; federal spending gets more and more out of control, with less and less tangible results bought by it. The notable exception is one Donald John Trump, and we all know what they did to him. As Bono once said, no matter who you vote for, a politician gets in.
In a most refreshing departure from the recent norm, Walsh’s closing ‘graphs are dead on the money.
The Democrats say they want everyone to vote and every vote to count, but what they mean is they want their people to vote, and only their votes to count. Reinstating a property requirement, or even restricting voting to those with a positive net worth (even if it’s only one cent), regardless of race or sex—although there were and still remain strong arguments against female suffrage—would do wonders for governance, but it will never happen for reasons you well know. The point of the exercise is not to preserve the Republic for a better tomorrow but to destroy it.
In their incessant quest to dilute the value of the vote by expanding it, the Left has shown its true anti-constitutional colors. Should one pose the value-neutral question, “Why should the franchise be universal?” the answer is “because.” As we go about our efforts to restore the intent of the Constitution, it behooves us to remember the crucial role that property—”skin in the game,” as we might say today—has played in the preservation of our freedom from the beginning. Now you understand why the communist/Marxist Left is so dead set against it, and why it has inverted the very concept of freedom against those who would preserve it.
We want, and were given, ordered liberty. We prize our Constitution; these blackguards despise it. But it’s our Republic, not their “democracy,” and it’s about time we make that clear to them—by any means necessary, as they like to say.
Yes, yes, a thousand times YES. It’s about damned time one of our more prominent pundits just came right out and said it, no flinching, no backfilling, no equivocation. Good on ya, friend Mike.
Ancient history this country is now an oligarchy