Now what, Republicans? Our worthless opinions and romanticized delusions about democracy as a Grecian pursuit of august Jeffersonian erudition won’t save us.
It is Republicans who romanticize democracy, not Democrats. Democrats romanticize outnumbering, overwhelming, and overtaking their opposition; their modus operandi isn’t much different from Islamic supremacists, the Chinese, and malignant cancerous cells that seek to outnumber, overwhelm, and overtake healthy cells.
To affirm just how pathetic the national GOP is, Republicans are placing their hopes and dreams with . . . Joe Manchin, senator from West Virginia.
We debunk ourselves, oblivious to our own self-irony.
The Problem
Republicans have to work much harder to drive voter turnout than do Democrats. This is because too many Republicans live in a world created by George Will, Willard Romney, and William Kristol, where democracy is an endeavor of Socratic nobility, in which the finest traits of Man are made manifest for all the world to see.
Democrats? Nah, they don’t bother with any of that drivel—outnumber, overwhelm, and overtake. Vote blue no matter who, no matter what. This is simple-majority democracy, and simple-majority democracy is political terrorism.
We lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by a combined 43,000 votes; a total of 4.3 million registered voters in these states stayed home on Election Day, and I promise you the majority weren’t Democrats. Furthermore, the Libertarian candidate received more votes in each state than was the margin of victory for Biden. Libertarians are romanticizers of democracy as well.
Had we won the three, Trump and Biden would have each finished with 269 electoral votes, and the U.S. House of Representatives would have soon thereafter, in accordance with the 12th Amendment, held a contingent election, with a state delegation voting for president, and a U.S. Senate vote for vice president. End result? Keep America Great, and a real-life, real-time civics lesson. How breathtakingly beautiful it would have been.
Instead, we were subjected to a march of futility in Washington, D.C., on January 6, accompanied with dopes who dress like Conan the Barbarian, and some inanity about 75 million voters—we now love the popular vote! Though I don’t doubt that massive amounts of mailed paper ballots (subject to fraud and errors) and Democrats’ interstate migration hurt us, we were hurt far more by the usual Republican laziness, torpor, and obsession with the romanticization of democracy. In electoral politics, no man is an island.
Voter fraud? Who cares?
If we had a Republican Party that had taken the time, all those years ago, to actually understand the Democratic opposition, it would have created a culture whose members would have deployed the identical modus operandi as the Democrats; the most effective means by which to defeat fraud is to outnumber, overtake, and overwhelm the fraudsters. Instead, the GOP has spent years insulting our intelligence, eagerly awaiting cocktail party invitations from the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post and evoking some boilerplate balderdash about Lincoln and Reagan as “great statesmen and orators.” Prattling on ad infinitum about voter fraud achieves the worst possible outcome: letting the GOP—and its voters in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin (throw in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where millions of registered voters also stayed home)—off the hook.
Lincoln allowed Union and Confederate soldiers to be executed by the federal government, if laws of war were violated, as well as to be placed into hard labor; and the primary reason the Berlin Wall was toppled was that a weakened Union of Soviet Socialist Republics genuinely feared that Reagan would drop an atomic bomb on her. What, Rep. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) never told you any of that?
Like Trump, the framers, Lincoln, and Reagan had an innate understanding that freedom is won and preserved not by diplomacy and tooth fairies, but by force; peace is preferred, but force will be deployed unapologetically, if necessary. Constitutionally, Trump was actually a very vanilla, nuts and bolts, Xs and Os president—he did nothing egregiously unconstitutional. Yes, he was occasionally a little clumsy around the Second Amendment, but he always self-corrected.
Federally, America is no longer much of a republic and Biden is, at best, a Manchurian president who will sign what he’s told to sign with his China-made pens. To lose, on the same day, the presidency, and two U.S. Senate seats necessary to prevent a Democratic congressional tyranny of the majority, was a most fitting denouement to the tragedy of the national GOP.
Incidentally, about 2.8 million registered Georgia voters didn’t vote in the Senate runoffs; Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won by 55,000 votes and 93,000 votes respectively. Thanks for nothing, Peach State Republicans who didn’t bother to vote.
The Solution
We need re-education about democracy, and the de-romanticization process must commence immediately.
Democracy is the benign versus the malignant; it is a terrible model of governance—it is just that it is the least terrible of all the terrible models. It is made less terrible, however, when adult-minded Americans participate in it—this point is illustrated in my soon-to-be-released book, 10 Warning Signs Your Child is Becoming a Democrat: How to Make America Grown-up Again.
Yes or no: the Framers trusted We the People to make future correct decisions? If you answered “yes,” your romanticization of democracy as a mellifluous Shakespearean sonnet is showing. Had the Founders believed this, they would have constructed the republic as a simple-majority democracy.
They didn’t, and for good reason. “Remember,” wrote John Adams in 1814, “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” And as George Washington warned in 1791, “The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded. Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible.”
The only point Washington was mistaken on was his “sometimes” qualifier; it’s almost always. It is not coincidental that he expressed this five months before the ratification of the Bill of Rights.
Democrats have spent the last century infiltrating virtually every public and private sector industry in the United States, including once-reliable red states. Democrats have always focused on outcomes and results; opinions don’t pay the bills, win and influence—outcomes and results do. Too many Republicans, conversely, have spent the last half-century espousing their worthless, useless, irrelevant, insignificant, and romanticized opinions—which have never resulted in a singular win, of any kind, anywhere.
The sad irony is, I don’t believe there actually are more Democrats than non-Democrats; at least not at the moment. The Democrats now own the legislative and executive branches, but there are 23 GOP trifecta state legislatures/governors, compared to 15 for the Democrats. The GOP is also the majority in another eight state legislatures that have Democratic governors.
State sovereignty is all we’re likely to have left soon. Congress and the D.C. swamp are irreparable; too adulterated, and eventually the money printing machine will be junked. The macro is failing, or has failed, but the micro could lead us to salvation.
I know, I know: “Rich, we’re not a democracy, we’re a constitutional republic.” As if Democrats actually care. Our Constitution, our framework, and our principles are all abstractions—inanimate objects that endure, or are murdered, by man.
This should be a year of sounding the alarm. Soundings are what the founders, Lincoln, Reagan, and Trump did; except Trump will be a mere footnote in the GOP’s history because the silly party can’t romanticize him.
Benjamin Franklin’s 1787 “a republic, if you can keep it” comment is cited often by Republicans. Rarely, however, does one ever say the balance of the quote. In the full exchange, Franklin is asked why the citizens of the young republic wouldn’t want to keep their republic; he reportedly replied: “Because the people, on tasting the dish, are always disposed to eat more of it than does them good.”
Chew on that, Republicans, and get back to me with some solutions to resuscitate America from her attempted suicide. Tick tock.