The U.S. Is Not A Democracy. It’s A Republic if You Can Keep It. Part 5

In parts 1 through 4, we learned the U.S. is a republican structure of government. Continuing on with the airplane analogy, our system contains a variety of control cockpits, or the best parts of various forms of government. For example, our system contains one aspect of democracy: voting once per year for five minutes; monarchy: U.S. president for four years; oligarchy: most school boards for four years.

We also learned the architects reserved structural maintenance solely and exclusively in the hands of the governed – remember Mrs. Eliza Powel? After our introduction to her, we should be inspired to learn the U.S. republican structure, recruit a local maintenance crew, and start ‘keeping it.’

It is worth repeating the ‘airplane’ metaphor. At present, the Left-side passengers are extremely angry with and ‘resisting’ the Right-side pilot for the direction he is taking the plane (the country). These same passengers, fueled by contempt for the Right side, are verbally condoning violence against the Right-side passengers and pilot. They hate the pilot for turning the plane to the right and the passengers on the Right side for supporting the pilot.

On the other side of the aircraft, the Right-side passengers, in contempt for the Left side, enthusiastically support the pilot for turning the plane to the right. They are even exuberant that their pilot has control. Some on the Right will blindly follow the pilot no matter how erratically he flies the plane, as did the Left when their pilot was in the cockpit.

Ironically, an aircraft is one of the safest places above the earth when it is airborne. Just as any airplane must overcome gravity, our U.S. republic must overcome human nature to fly. While ‘airborne,’ it functions much like a monarchy...

… Roundly described, socialism is a proposition that every community, by means of whatever forms of organization may be most effective for the purpose, see to it for itself that each one of its members finds the employment for which he is best suited and is rewarded according to his diligence and merit, all proper surroundings of moral influence being secured to him by the public authority. “State socialism” is willing to act through state authority as it is at present organized. It proposes that all idea of a limitation of public authority by individual rights be put out of view, and that the State consider itself bound to stop only at what is unwise or futile in its universal superintendence alike of individual and of public interests. The thesis of the state socialist is that no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the State may not cross at will; that omnipotence of legislation is the first postulate of all just political theory.

Applied in a democratic state, such doctrine sounds radical, but not revolutionary. It is only an acceptance of the extremest logical conclusions deducible from democratic principles long ago received as respectable. For it is very clear that in fundamental theory, socialism and democracy are almost, if not quite, one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals. […]

Corporations grow on every hand, and on every hand not only swallow and overawe individuals but also compete with governments.The contest is no longer between government and individuals; it is now between government and dangerous combinations and individuals. Here is a monstrously changed aspect of the social world. In face of such circumstances, must not government lay aside all timid scruple and boldly make itself an agency for social reform as well as for political control? “Yes,” says the democrat, “perhaps it must. You know it is my principle, no less than yours, that every man shall have an equal chance with every other man: if I saw my way to it as a practical politician, I should be willing to go farther and superintend every man’s use of his chance. But the means? The question with me is not whether the community has power to act as it may please in these matters, but how it can act with practical advantage–a question of policy.” A question of policy primarily, but also a question of organization, that is to say of administration. …

— Woodrow Wilson, Socialism and Democracy, 1887

Not a word out of Wilson with respect to any republic (certainly not the US Republic), but lots and lots about collectives, “corporations” as bogeymen, and the government acting as it pleases.

BTW, Adolf Schickelgruber’s policy within the Third Reich was “state socialism”.

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