For almost two millennia the concepts of democracy and republic as governments representing a majority of a nation's citizens remained virtually forgotten in an age of divinely appointed kings and princes. The term “republic” was adopted by several oligarchic states (Venice, Florence, Calvin's Geneva, and Cromwell's England come to mind) to provide a facade of legitimacy to a corrupt police state, a practice that continues to this day.
In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, The Enlightenment swept through Europe and its colonies. England's John Locke, France's Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and America's Thomas Jefferson (among others), developed the concept of a social contract as the basis for all government. This political theory is based on the axiom that true sovereignty rests solely with the People of the nation as a whole. The People then undertake through this “social contract” a set of reciprocal obligations with each other by establishing a system of government. When a majority of the People believe that this government—or its officers—violate the contract, the People have not only the right, but the duty, to remove those officers or change that government, whichever they believe necessary.
It has always been the oligarchs, the self-anointed aristocracy, who have proven the greatest threat to democracies and republics. The wealthiest men in Athens pushed their city-state into war to ensure their continuing commercial hegemony. These were the same men who meekly acquiesced to Sparta destroying their city's form of government and placing a council of oligarchs (consisting of themselves of course) in its place.
As the Roman Republic's power increased, the aristocrats of Rome's aristocracy became far more interested in self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment than in what was best for Rome. They stole from their conquests, they stole from their allies, they stole from Rome's plebeians and treasury; each with equal facility and lack of conscience. When they were opposed, they organized “death squads” (to use Michael Parenti's term) to use against their domestic opponents, and sent Rome's legions against their foreign enemies and debtors.
Unfortunately, our democratic republic, our representative democracy, is facing its own oligarchic threat. These pseudo-aristocrats intentionally misuse terms like “socialist” and “socialism” among others, ignoring the actual meaning of those words (socialism—A social system in which the means of producing and distributing goods are owned collectively and political power is exercised by the whole community—The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition copyright © 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company), to describe any attempt to level the playing field for the majority of Americans. Their assaults on the commons of our nation and the hopes of the majority of our citizens are reprehensible.
Nor do these oligarch's hesitate to misquote, or misattribute, or make up quotes out of thin air by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the other Founding Fathers to justify their injustice. David Barton of the Wallbuilders organization is especially infamous for the creation of quotes. The pseudo-aristocracy's ongoing failure to play by the rules of good scholarship (Ann Coulter is a perfect example, who, as an attorney should know better, is one of the worst offenders), makes me conclude that everyone of them should be forced to retake Freshman Writing. Rectifying the language, indeed.
When Annoyed calls for the repeal of the XVII th Amendment in his article—the direct election of United States Senators by the people of a given state—it leads me to conclude that Annoyed is nothing but a neo-Confederate (the other neocons) crypto-oligarch. Repealing the XVII th Amendment is an oligarch's wet dream, because it means they can make certain that oligarch's are in charge of the United States Senate—and in control of treaties and appointments—just as they were one hundred years ago.
Annoyed claims that this is necessary to reinstitute “states rights” in the United States. I see this as a way for the rich and trans-national corporations to increase their already considerable power at the expense of the majority of Americans. He further demonstrates his oligarchic ideology by slandering Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and the average American's ability to participate in his government.
I should expect the disparagement of two of our greatest Presidents from a neo-Confederate oligarch, and history defends Lincoln and Roosevelt far better than I could ever hope. However, I feel the need to defend my fellow Americans against such a heinous insult.
I hold that the sole limitations of the American people to constructively participate in their governance are the time, ability and desire to keep themselves informed. Justice Hugo Black, when he was a U.S. Senator from Alabama in 1933, proposed that the work week should be shortened to thirty hours—both to reduce unemployment, and to facilitate the American people's ongoing self-education—when the average work week was closer to fifty hours.
Annoyed's scholarship is poor, and he seems to have cobbled together much of his article by cutting-and-pasting large portions of the material from several conservative and libertarian web sites (FreeRepublic.com, fff.org, surfingtheapocalypse.net, among others) without attribution. He also fails to provide proper attribution for many of the quotes he uses in his articles.
For example, in his article, Simply Annoyed provides a second-hand quote from the 1965 edition of a book, The Roots of Capitalism by John Chamberlain. In this book, Chamberlain attributed the following quote to Alexis de Tocqueville; “The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.”
There are two problems with this quote: 1) you should always use the original source of the quote; 2) while Chamberlain attributed it to de Tocqueville, but I could not find the original source of that quote in two afternoons of searching for it at the library.
When I first read the quote, it struck me as strange. It has been years since I read de Tocqueville's masterwork, Democracy in America, and I did not remember anything like that quote being in the pages of that book, and it seemed contrary to the overall message of the book. So I searched Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and several similar works for the quote. I Googled the quote. I checked the University of Virginia's on line library. I even checked out a copy of Democracy in America, and spent a couple evenings skimming through it, looking for that quote.
Nothing. Nada. Zip.
This does not mean that this quote is not something that de Tocqueville said or wrote. I am not accusing Simply Annoyed or John Chamberlain of making it up. I am saying that two afternoons of diligent search did not prove that it is correct to attribute this quote to Alexis de Tocqueville.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
