On LevinTV Tuesday, conservative talk radio show host Mark Levin wiped the floor with Lawrence O’Donnell after the liberal MSNBC hack called the United States Senate an “anti-democratic” institution.
Republicanism vs Democracy
The Framers didn't create a "democracy" – they were afraid of creating one
Nobody knows the Constitution like Mark: https://t.co/ICZsTSMn7z pic.twitter.com/Zsp5H0Ysok
— LevinTV (@LevinTV) February 4, 2020
Progressives consider it one of the worst insults they can throw at someone (or an entire institution): calling them “anti-democratic.” You see, when they say “anti-democratic,” they actually mean “authoritarian” or even “fascist.”
Just to rub it in, O’Donnell went on to call the Senate “American democracy’s most structural flaw.”
Sadly for O’Donnell and his fellow radical leftists, however, America is not now and has never been a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic. The Founding Fathers made that choice very deliberately because they understood that real, full democracy is actually extremely dangerous.
As Levin explained on his show, the Senate was actually meant to protect the interests of the individual states. “The 17th amendment” was, Levin explained, a “disaster.” Back in the day, if an attorney general from a state took a specific position, the state’s senator would follow suit in the Senate (which would’ve shot down ObamaCare). Now, however, senators can do as they darn well please. This “democratization” has severely weakened the American system.
“They wanted to set up a government,” Levin said about the Founding Fathers, “that would protect us from tyranny; from as many forms as tyranny as they could think of. Whether it was centralized monarchical-type tyranny or it’s one branch overpowering another branch, but they certainly didn’t support democracy, little ‘d’ democracy. They weren’t populists. They weren’t democrats. They were constitutionalists. There is a huge difference.”
One of the main reasons that the framers were less than positive about democracy as such was the French Revolution. For ten years, the French revolutionaries were slaughtering each other. It started with the king and his queen, but over time, just about everybody was fair game if they were deemed to stand in the way of “the people.”
America’s Founding Fathers wanted to protect their people from a similar fate in which the majority oppressed and even murdered the minority.
Next, Levin drew attention to the Declaration of Independence. “What does the Declaration stand for?” he asked rhetorically. “Democracy?” No. “Unalienable rights. How do we protect your God-given natural rights: to life, to liberty, to private property, to defend yourself. How do we protect that?”
That was the framers’ guiding question, and it’s why they eventually devised a system with an independent judiciary, a Senate formed by the states, a House of Representatives directly elected by the people, and a president who was to be the executive.
As Levin went on to say, “you don’t protect [those unalienable rights] by pure democracy.” In a “democracy,” 51% of the people can vote to kill the other 49% just because they dare hold different political views — which is basically what happened in France, by the way. The framers wanted to prevent that from happening… and knew that this is where pure democracy can lead to. This is why they designed the system the way they did.
O’Donnell doesn’t care about any of that, however. Why? As Levin put it, “this guy is a diabolical idiot.”
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