"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule," said Thomas Jefferson, "where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49." James Madison agreed, "Democracy is the most vile form of government." Their Federalist rivals concurred.
“Democracy … arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects,” said Aristotle.
But if the Philosopher disliked the form of government that arose
out of the fallacy of human equality, the Founding Fathers detested it.
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule,” said Thomas
Jefferson, “where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of
the other 49.” James Madison agreed, “Democracy is the most vile form of
government.” Their Federalist rivals concurred.
“Democracy,” said John Adams, “never lasts long. It soon wastes,
exhausts and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not
“You people, sir, is a great beast,” Alexander Hamilton is said to have remarked. If he did not, it was not far from his view.
Said John Winthrop, the Pilgrim father whose vision of a “city on a hill” so inspired Ronald Reagan, “A democracy is … accounted the meanest and worst form of government.”
But did not the fathers create modernity’s first democracy?
No. They created “a republic, if you can keep it,” as Ben
Franklin said, when asked in Philadelphia what kind of government they
had given us. A constitutional republic, to protect and defend God-given
rights that antedated the establishment of that government.
We used to know that. Growing up, we daily pledged allegiance “to
the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which
it stands,” not some democracy. As Walter Williams writes, Julia Ward
Howe did not write the “Battle Hymn of the Democracy.”
Today, we are taught to worship what our fathers abhorred to such
an extent that politicians and ideologues believe America was put on
Earth to advance a worldwide revolution to ensure that all nations are
Only then, said George W. Bush, can America be secure.
The National Endowment for Democracy was established for this
quintessentially neoconservative end and meddles endlessly in the
internal affairs of nations in a fashion Americans would never tolerate.
The democratists are now celebrating the revolutions across the
Islamic world in the same spirit, if in less exalted language, as
William Wordsworth celebrated the French Revolution, “Bliss was it in
that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!”
After 1789 ushered in Robespierre and Saint-Just, the Terror, the
dictatorship and the Napoleonic wars, enthusiasm cooled. But with the
Lenin-Trotsky revolution of 1917, Mao’s revolution of 1949 and Castro’s
revolution of 1959, the exhilaration returned, only to see the bright
hopes dashed again in blood and terror.
Last month, the Egyptian revolution enraptured us, with
“pro-democracy” demonstrators effecting, through the agency of the
Egyptian army, the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, a friend and
ally for three decades.
In the exhilaration of their democratic triumph, some of the boys
in Tahrir Square celebrated with serial sexual assaults on American
journalist Lara Logan. A week after the triumph, returned Sheikh Yusuf
al-Qaradawi addressed a crowd estimated at 1 million in Tahrir Square.
In January 2009, Qaradawi had declared that “throughout history,
Allah has imposed upon the (Jews) people who would punish them for their
corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. … Allah
willing, the next time will be in the hand of the believers.”
“Qaradawi is very much in the mainstream of Egyptian society,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor.
In 2004, this centrist was apparently offered the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Today, we read that, liberated from Mubarak, Muslims set fire to a Christian church in Sol, south of Cairo, then attacked it with hammers.
When enraged Christians set up roadblocks in Cairo demanding the
government rebuild the church, they were set upon by Muslims as soldiers
stood by. Thirteen people, most of them Coptic Christians, were shot to
death on Tuesday, and more than a hundred were wounded in the worst
religious violence in years.
Revolutions liberate people from tyranny, but also free them up
to indulge old hates, settle old scores and give vent to their passions.
What are the passions that will be unleashed by the revolution that has the Arab nation aflame?
Surely, one is for greater freedom, good jobs and prosperity,
such as the West and East Asia have been able to produce for their
Yet if even European nations like Greece, Ireland and Spain,
which used to deliver this, no longer seem able to do so, how will these
Arab nations, which have never produced freedom, prosperity or progress
on a large scale, succeed in the short time they will have?
Answer: They will not. The great Arab revolution will likely fail.
And when it does, those other passions coursing through the
region will rise to dominance. And what are they but ethnonationalism,
tribalism and Islamic fundamentalism?
What will eventually unite this turbulent region – when its
peoples fail to achieve what they are yearning for – is who and what
they are all against.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls.