James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10, The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection, about the inherent flaws of direct democracy.  Put simply, governments need to be moral and rational in making decisions, and public majorities are not by nature moral and rational.

In theory, democratically elected representatives would make the rational and moral decisions needed for effective government, and a democratic public will if given the opportunity elect wise representatives to make those decisions.  On that theory, the US Constitution was written.

Madison described the persons who would be elected as representatives:

“… men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters …”

“Does the advantage consist in the substitution of representatives whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices and schemes of injustice? It will not be denied that the representation of the Union will be most likely to possess these requisite endowments.”

Other writing of the time show a similar descriptions of the character of the elected representatives.

Enter Nancy Pelosi, Harry Ried, and Barack Obama.  The voting public elected thosse three mentally deficient, socially backwards, neo-Marxists, who are as you read this trying to destroy the Republic.  They are the people’s elected representatives.  They have none of the positive characteristics the Framers anticipated, and all of the negative characteristics.  They are the people the Framers were trying to keep out of government.

Madison describes the antics of bad political leaders:  “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it;”

He was clearly describing just a few of the behaviors of the frothing pack of Marxist bonobos that are currently running the US government.

The Framers also expected that the wise elected representatives would prevent the public from being ruled by fad thinking.  Global warming anyone?

So what went wrong?

The Framers miscalculated.  They just assumed that the electorate would choose the wisest of the people to be their representatives.  Instead, we vote according to the ability of the representative to bring home the pork.  When the average American votes we ask “Who will give me the most from the government treasury?”  We tend to vote for representatives who represent our collective selfish passions instead of our love of freedom and principles.  We vote based on what we see on TV, even though what we see on TV is highly filtered and politically skewed.  How many people in the US know about the hundreds of thousands of babies we killed in Iraq in the 1990′s?  How many care?  It wasn’t on TV, so it didn’t happen.

Madison describes the general character of democracies: “Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

In forming a representative democracy the Framers tried to stave off the evils of pure democracy.  When I read about the evils the Framers were trying to prevent, and I see the leaders of today’s government seeming to use those description of evils more as a guideline for how to behave and less as a warning for how not to behave, I seriously wonder if we are not on the verge of the violent death that Madison described to us.

A free society must have a center of rationality and morality if it is to thrive and sustain itself.  Democracy provides neither of those.  US government is a democracy.  The theory that a representative democracy would prevent the problems of pure democracy has been proven false by our ongoing experiences with our elected representatives.  The ongoing actions of our representatives tend to be neither rational nor particularly moral.  I do not see how the US can not collapse as other democracies have.

When I look at the negligence and ignorance of the Constitution shown by Federal judges, when I see the greed and corruption and general stupidity of the members of Congress, when I see the perpetually lying Marxist moron in the White House, propped up by a sympathetic and supportive press corp, when I see a public that so profoundly does not see the problems in their government and that does not understand the foundations of republican government, in all seriousness I wonder if these are America’s last days.

Stumble it!