Thursday, October 20, 2011

What Democracy Looks Like

The Occupy protesters, and the protesters that went up against Governor Walker in Wisconsin, share a particular chant. They claimed, "This is what democracy looks like."

Democracy is mob-rule, so those unruly mobs are right, that is what democracy looks like.

John Adams, I think, sums up the dangers of pure democracy nicely:

"[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few." --John Adams, An Essay on Man's Lust for Power, 1763

We are a republic.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

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