America Is Not A Pure Democracy

Other countries are facing civil war. There are riots, mobs, overthrowing of governments, and regime changes taking place in almost all of the nations of the Middle East. Recently, mobs have been gathering in the United Kingdom, and in some of the states in our country calling for change or lack thereof to certain laws. Our nation, upon being founded, made a decision to become a representative democratic republic. The establishment of law and following the rule of law is to be paramount in a representative democratic republic. There are some people (even politicians), who have the mistaken idea that we are a pure democracy in America. That is not true. A pure democracy is a government of the masses. In a pure democracy, every decision that is to be made in government is made by a vote or some other expression by the masses. Being a representative form of government, the people (thus the phrase, “We the people), elect at determined election times the people who will represent their wishes and values and authorize them to make laws and set regulations that will govern.

 As there is a time when those who are elected to represent the people no longer represent the wishes of the people, at the next scheduled election other people are then elected that will promise to represent the wishes of the people. It sounds complex and it is. It might have a desire to be simple, but when the people elected misunderstand their role and begin to set and pass laws that do not represent the wishes of the people, there is a push back on the elected representatives. There were some of our nation’s founders who wanted to see a pure federalist form of government. That form of government would not have allowed for state or local governments. The entire law making assignment would have been granted to the federal government.

We have seen a twist on this concept of representative republic over time when the elected representatives have not wanted to follow through with their assignment and have tossed the ball, as it were, back to the people for a vote on an issue and called that a true democracy. We have seen this done many times in recent decades in California when the people there are called upon to vote on almost everything that is to be made into law. That seems to be a great way for the elected representatives to place the blame on the people in case a bad law is approved by the people. We are seeing this lived out in our state with the concept of having local votes on the Sunday sales of alcohol in package stores. Many of the same elected officials who expect to be applauded for that attitude recoil at the idea that any should ask them to break their constitutional assignment in passing laws that raise taxes on the people not allowing the people to vote on the issue.

An uninformed public continues to chant that the people must decide. The people have every opportunity to decide at the ballot box when they elect the people who will represent them until the next election. There is not enough money or time to hold all the elections that would be necessary should we somehow come to a place of a pure democracy that would require the people to make all the decisions concerning every law. During the last several election cycles there has been so much voter apathy one could see where we might be at a place that some people would insist on the people deciding, because they know that then only a very small percentage of the registered voters would really care enough to become informed on the issues and even a smaller number would care enough to invest the necessary time to go to the polls and vote on election day.

In a real representative democratic republic, the people would be informed on the candidates they are electing and hold those elected to the values on which they ran and were placed in office.

Call me naïve but I am still waiting for the elected politicians to come to the point to understand they are accountable to the special interest group known as “citizens” who elected them to office. We are at the point in our history where we must insist on a real representative democratic republic form of government, not a pure democracy and certainly never a mobocracy.

Ray Newman:  All Rights Reserved