Democracies and republics

Talk about word games! Hahaha! The people that worked on the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution made a BIG distinction between “democracy” and “republic”. Quoting 20th century politicians who conflate the terms with a new definition of “democracy” does not help the discussion. Witness the ridiculous names for totalitarian states like the Democratic Republic of North Korea!!

Lincoln’s definition is itself just word play. Abraham Lincoln had a federal officer return an escaped slave in Illinois to his “owner” in Missouri. He suspended habeus corpus illegally. He hounded one opposition congressman in a northern state who had to flee to Canada for his life. He had his troops shoot live fire into a crowd in New York that was protesting the military draft. Before the war started, he proposed making slavery permanent in the Constitution as a way to keep the Union, thereby proving once and for all that the whole Civil War was fought to protect tyranny by the central government. He had planned on shipping blacks all back to Africa, because the poor things could not compete fairly with whites, so he said.

Forget ex post facto laws. The tyrant went after opponents who violated no laws.

In truth I trust neither republics nor democracies nor monarchies nor any other form of “government” to be fair or to fulfill their defenders’ justifications. Checks and balances obviously have not worked at all in the US or elsewhere. The only fair society promotting peace and prosperity is one where its members practice the non-aggression principle. The outliers, like thieves and invaders, who violate this, in such a society, would be suppressed by the principle of self-defense. Before you say that’s impractical, look at what you already have in every place ruled in history and in the present by any kind of government. They all start their existence based on theft, without which they cannot exist: Pay “taxes” or meet forceful punishment.