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24,434
Abibisika (Black Gold) Points
The United States is not a democracy.
Why does the West continually lies by pushing democracy all over the world when they do not practice the same?
Is this the action of a God fearing people, or a Devil worshiping sect?
The mass follows the popular passions of the day published and socialized by the wealthy ones
Madison is primarily concerned with, and they are debtors and creditors.
The United States Constitution was never supposed to create a democracy.
The founders didn’t draft the constitution to make it one, and they certainly didn’t want it to be one. By democracy I mean, as did they, somewhat abstractly that the majority of power lies in the hands of the majority of the population, and that policy therefore more or less follows the popular passions of the day.
The powerful rule:
1. Senate
2. Electoral college
3. Supreme court
Many of our institutions, from the senate to the electoral college to the supreme court all reflect a reluctance to let the common people have much of a say at all.
More to the point though, the US was constituted in opposition to the idea of democracy.
Many of those founders that are responsible for the consolidated federation thought that there was too much democracy under the articles of confederation within the individual states, and that this put their property rights at risk. After all, Rhode Island had just been the first state to elect a populist government (which pointedly declined to attend the constitutional convention and later only ratified the constitution after the other states threatened to embargo them), and the Shaysites of Massachusetts wanted their state to follow suit, instituting policies such as debt relief and the printing of paper money that could lift thousands of farmers out of poverty.
Now I’m sure that many of you have seen conservatives argue about how the US is ‘a republic, not a democracy’, but that doesn’t really contribute to the conversation what they think it does.
When they quote Federalist 10, and talk about how Madison didn’t want majority factions calling all the shots, and use that to back up things such as the Senate and the Electoral College, they are entirely missing the context of that argument. Madison and the framers didn’t care all that much about protecting the people and the autonomy of the individual states.
In fact, Federalist 10 explicitly mentions what factions Madison is primarily concerned with, and they are debtors and creditors; the people who have property and those who do not. He says that property is “the most common and durable source of factions “, and those reforms from earlier? He calls those “wicked projects”. He was not worried about the states losing autonomy— in fact, the Federalists thought that giving less power to the states was a good thing; this was literally what the transition from a confederation to a federation was all about, after all.
Rather, Madison was worried that without a federal government, it would be too easy for the poor within each individual state to come together and demand change, which would come at the expense of the upper classes that the founders all belonged to.
Reference:
CMV: The United States Constitution was never supposed to create a democracy
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