Tim Tapp: The Reason We Don't Have A Democracy

The idea that the "majority should decide" has been used by those in power, to appease crowds for some time now. So, the language of democracy has rung sweetly in the ears of people living in Western-value-based nations since the time of the Greek philosophers. But there is a problem inherent in a straight democracy; the majority does rule, and minorities never win the political arguments when they inevitably arise. This rule by the majority always leads to feelings of being ignored and or marginalized for those who are not part of that majority, which leads to frustration and anger over time. That frustration has historically led to the formation of mobs.

The angry mob is a tool that has been used to overthrow those in power for centuries. Those who would rise up in revolution often are small in numbers - too small to take control on their own - so, to better their odds, they ferment unrest in the larger body of the minorities. The revolutionists fan the flames of division and anger using both the legitimate grievances of the people and using misinformation techniques to exaggerate the plight of the group they wish to nudge to become a mob.

For that reason, the Founding Fathers of the United States chose to add as many safeguards as they could into the Constitution. Safeguards to protect the rights of minorities from being ignored or overruled by the majority. Safeguards against too much power being placed in one person's hands. Safeguards meant to - at the very least - slow the advancement of tyranny and allow a moral people (they were hoping that would be us) to maintain individual liberty. For that reason, the United States has never had a democracy; we have always had a constitutionally federated republic that included democratic principles in its operation.

But some people just want to watch the world burn.

The Constitution has worked as a roadblock to those who wish to impose their will on the people who live in this nation. For that reason, many have been working to weaken the constraints of the Constitution since its ratification. Today, those constraints are little more than a speed bump as many elected officials move to impose their wills rather than follow the path laid out by the Framers.

America has been under assault since its inception. The idea of a nation that can be ruled by its people is dangerous in the minds of some. The notion that the government doesn't belong in the daily lives of a nation's citizens is a hard pill to swallow to those who believe that they know better than you how you should live, what you should think, etc. The enemies of individual liberty see the separation between the current government and the Constitution, and they have decided to elevate their attacks and break out that time-honored classic - the angry mob.

Because some people just want to watch the world burn.

The past few weeks, we have watched as legitimate outrage over the wrongful death of George Floyd morphed into riots, looting, and more wrongful deaths. We have seen all police vilified by the media and by "activists." We have seen places like Seattle give up control over blocks of the city that included homes and businesses (they have finally taken steps to re-establish control). We have watched the toppling of statues of historical figures, which now include the likes of Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt because of the complete lack of historical context. When the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, must be removed in the name of the Woke mob's cancel culture, it is not black lives that matter, it is the erasure of history that is at hand.

Make no mistake; this is an assault on the republic. It is not for the reasons that the organizers claim. Most of the people involved are well-meaning individuals seeking to address issues where our nation has fallen short. Still, they have been manipulated into becoming part of the angry mob. The unthinking angry mob that only feels rage and where those legitimate grievances are blurred and secondary as the individual has no voice in the crowd is a tool not for justice but revolution. Those who seek justice have been duped into mob-hood by organizations claiming to be one thing but are Marxists trying to end the republic.

When Nikole Hannah-Jones tweets that it would be an honor to remember these events as the "1619 Riots", she demonstrates her desire to see our republic burned down. When Shaun King tells people that statues of Jesus as "white European" should be torn down because they are a form of white supremacy, he is not encouraging people to come together to solve issues. An agenda is being pursued; a narrative is being engrained into our society. The goal is to end capitalism and abandon the republic, even if many of the people helping push the agenda are unaware of the result of following the path that they are on.

They just want to see the world that has been built burn down because they want to re-make it in their own image.

Our republic has not always lived up to the principles that we laid its foundations upon, but the United States is the freest nation in the world for all those who reside here. The flaws that are often pointed out by America's critics are not flaws of the systems but the men at the levers of those systems. All humans are flawed and holding them to an impossible standard serves no purpose (other than to excuse their cancel). The nation has grown, and as it moved forward, those promises in the founding documents have been realized by more and more people. Each day is a step closer to fulfilling the vision of individual liberty for all in a society that does not make judgments based on skin color; a step further down the path began not in 1619 but 1776. 

Don't let these revolutionaries whip up mobs and erase the history that we share. Don't let them burn down the republic and end the two hundred plus year journey that we have been on together. I can't promise you when all our societal ills will be remedied (or if they ever will be). But I can tell you that socialism nor communism can ever solve the issues that are dividing us today. A fight for equality, for individual freedoms, can never be achieved in a system that requires you to be a cog in the machine. Remember that true democracy is little more than two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner, so there are no protections for minorities. That is why we have a republic and not a democracy. Let's keep it and move forward together.