In this episode, I talk about the difference between a constitutional republic and a democracy, and why the two are different. I also talk about why a republic is better than a democracy and why a democracy is worse than a republic.
00:10:47.080Well, because, well, I'll get to that in a second.
00:10:49.220But I want to talk a little more about the ways that the Democrats are trying to remove still any barriers to the democratic process, right?
00:10:57.820They want to get rid of the Electoral College, right?
00:11:03.020Oh, Donald Trump and George Bush both won with the Electoral College.
00:11:07.120They're recognizing that the demographic power is shifting, that the smaller states are losing their demographic power, and the larger states are obviously gaining it.
00:11:18.520But they recognize that the Electoral College is the main thing keeping Republicans in the game in a lot of ways, and so they want to get rid of that, saying that kind of a more direct democracy would be the right thing to do.
00:11:31.880They want to, in many ways, abolish the Senate, right?
00:11:34.600The Senate's already been more democratized through the 17th Amendment.
00:11:38.040But on top of that, they want to go ahead and say, oh, well, actually, what we want to do is we want to get rid of this, or make that proportional, too.
00:11:48.840We don't want the Senate to be equal number of people for each state.
00:11:52.280We want that to also be proportional because it's not fair.
00:11:55.220For some reason, we have to have everything has to be, well, it's not for some reason.
00:11:58.700It's a specific reason because it will get them more power.
00:12:00.860We want to open that up so we can use kind of our demographic advantage to wield power through the Senate as well.
00:12:07.700We don't want it to be any kind of hindrance on our power there.
00:12:10.880And then, of course, they're also now looking to alter the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court is kind of the last bastion of non-democratic governance, right?
00:12:21.020It's the one place where you don't vote on a Supreme Court justice.
00:12:37.920They love the court back when it was doing everything they wanted, you know, when it was the Warren Court, when it was back in the 60s or something.
00:12:45.460They would just win in all of these decisions.
00:13:01.680And if we can't pack the court, we should go out.
00:13:03.520You know, they want to go intimidate judges.
00:13:05.840It's very clear that that's their goal.
00:13:08.140The White House specifically told protesters to illegally gather on the lawns of Supreme Court justices to put pressure on them during the Roe v. Wade overturning.
00:13:20.800And so this is something that they have focused on, right?
00:13:24.040Destroying any one of these last barriers to democracy.
00:13:28.040Now, you might say, but, you know, it says somewhere in the Constitution that we are one, and that's great.
00:13:33.740Okay, I agree with you that we used to be, 100% agree that we used to be a constitutional republic.
00:13:41.420But this is something that the left is correct about and the right doesn't get.
00:13:45.500Like, the Constitution is, in many ways, a living document.
00:13:52.320It will be updated formally through the amendment process, which has made us less of a constitutional republic, not more, over time, as I've just laid out.
00:14:02.200The constitutional amendment process, the one that you're supposed to follow, is something that has made us more of a democracy, not more of a constitutional republic, over time.
00:14:12.260That has been the consistent trend going forward.
00:14:15.720But on top of this, you know, but on top of this, these statutes are updated, even not formally, right?
00:14:28.760If you have a population that no longer shares the moral visions and traditions of the people who wrote the Constitution, they don't have the history, they don't have the background, they don't have the understanding, they don't have the same vision of community and the future and the same care, then the words on the paper don't really protect you.
00:14:49.520You have to have the political will to continue the traditions that are supposed to be captured on that page.
00:14:57.760And so the Constitution saying certain things about you being a republic doesn't matter if in practice, everything you do actually makes you more and more of a democracy.
00:15:08.620Now, why do the Democrats want more and more of a democracy?
00:15:11.740Well, in one instance we already talked about, they want to expand government when they want to expand power, right?
00:15:16.660But on top of that, they also want more of a democracy because they realize that actually we have transferred, right?
00:15:27.440We're not really a democracy in the sense of the people choose because the people never really choose.
00:15:33.340It turns out that one of the advantages to opening up democracy, having more and more democracy is that actually the power of social engineering increases, the power of the media increases, the power of academia increases, the power of the oligarchic class increases as you open up democracy.
00:15:54.120Because the people who are most able to influence popular opinion are those oligarchs, right?
00:16:00.140When you have popular sovereignty as your legitimating mechanism, then the best thing to do if you're an elite who wants to stay in power and all elites want to stay in power is manipulate the public.
00:16:14.640I'm not the first person to come up with this, right?
00:16:17.220Chomsky saw it from the other side, but he's not wrong about this particular aspect, right?
00:16:21.200You are in a situation where the people who control these levers of power want more and more popular input because they can control the popular input because they're the ones who have a constant ability because of their hegemonic control of these institutions, media, education, that kind of stuff.
00:16:41.080They are able to shape the awareness of the people, they're able to focus the attention of the people where they want.
00:16:47.640They're able to control the information that is delivered to them, and that allows them to manipulate the vote.
00:16:54.440And if that doesn't work at the end of the day, they'll just do what they did in 2020, right?
00:16:59.640Time magazine wrote a story celebrating the fact that all these organizations came together to alter the way that voting worked,
00:17:07.780to alter the message, to control every piece of information that could go out to voters so that they could work together to defeat Donald Trump.
00:17:16.960And so is that the will of the people?
00:17:22.600Because that's the mechanism they're using.
00:17:24.580But it's not really the people who are in charge in that scenario, especially once we start getting to how votes get counted and that kind of thing.
00:17:31.180But you don't even have to make any accusations in that area.
00:17:34.720You can look at books like Rigged by Molly Hemingway, which do a great job of laying out all the out-in-front ways that the election was controlled by people like Mark Zuckerberg.
00:17:48.480You don't have to get into crazy speculation, even though I don't think a lot of that speculation is crazy.
00:17:52.860You don't have to get any kind of dicey or spicy territory to say that the 2020 election was manipulated,
00:17:58.900because the people who did it were very proud about it, and it's well-documented, again, by people like Molly Hemingway.
00:18:05.700So we're seeing this scenario where whether you like it or not, we are in a democracy, right?
00:25:04.120That's not the kind of system you're in.
00:25:06.120You're not really, because you don't have a shared vision of the good.
00:25:09.060You can't even begin to speak the same language to each other about what would be advantageous.
00:25:14.720And you can't make persuasive arguments on shared values to people who don't share your values.
00:25:20.220And you've kind of guaranteed that you have a population that doesn't and that you include as many of them as possible in your decision-making process.
00:25:28.140And, again, the things that work are controlling information, controlling people's understanding of the issues, and paying them off.
00:25:37.520Like, that's what works in a democracy.
00:25:39.560There's a reason that democracies consistently devolve into oligarchies.
00:25:44.400And I think it's hard to pretend that we don't have that kind of government today.
00:25:48.780And so I think what a lot of people say, okay, Oren, that's great.
00:26:48.760When, again, the problem isn't just what the words of the Constitution say.
00:26:53.200It's not like the Constitution had some bugs.
00:26:56.000And once you kind of figure those out, then you're fine.
00:26:58.980Constitution is a perfectly fine document for governing the people who lived under it at the time.
00:27:04.100The problem is that we decided to fracture ourselves and expand too far.
00:27:09.300And we have too many competing interests.
00:27:10.940And so there's too many people interested in manipulating the language of the Constitution.
00:27:15.980I mean, you could fix the language of the Constitution, sure.
00:27:19.120But, I mean, look at the Second Amendment.
00:27:20.500The Second Amendment is very clear about its intention.
00:27:22.900And yet, you know, it took us how long until we actually got a constitutional or a Supreme Court ruling that defends, you know, you finally get the Heller ruling that defends the ability of an individual to own a firearm.
00:27:39.420And even then, still, many areas, many Democratic areas, just ignore that constitutional ruling to this day.
00:27:46.200And so the problem isn't just the words in the Constitution.
00:27:48.160Because the Democrats can sit around and say, well, the Second Amendment doesn't matter.
00:27:51.900If liberals, progressives, the left can say, well, you know, that's not what that means.
00:27:56.440Well, you can do that to anything, right?
00:28:10.780The problem is the way that we understand ourselves as a nation.
00:28:15.400And until we solve that problem, until we can return to a place where we have shared values and a shared understanding of the good, and we have a tradition that actually moves itself forward, that informs the way that we live our lives, the way we interact with each other, and the way that we want government to interact with us, no, this is going to get fixed.
00:28:34.740Now, I'll be honest, and you won't be surprised by this.
00:28:37.740I'm not very hopeful about that happening at a national level.
00:28:40.900I don't really think that at any point you're going to see California start agreeing with Alabama.
00:28:46.940I don't really think you're going to see New York agree with Florida, except if you keep moving all of New York to Florida.
00:28:52.480And so the solution is probably going to be extreme federalism to the point of national divorce.
00:28:59.580Now, I've said this many times before.
00:29:00.920I don't think we're ever going to see like an actual secession of any of these states.
00:29:05.000I don't think you're really going to see, you know, a formal removal kind of upfront of these states from each other.
00:29:12.860But I think over time, there's a high degree of possibility that the incredibly incompetent system that we have now that can't keep planes in the sky, can't keep plane doors bolted on, you know, can't keep the power on.
00:29:27.420Eventually, that system is not going to be able to control the individual states.
00:29:30.240They're just going to lose their capacity to do that.
00:29:32.460We're already seeing Greg Abbott in Texas possibly taking action.
00:29:36.920I'm very interested to see what happens there.
00:29:38.620I don't want to I don't want to count my chickens first, but he has apparently removed the Border Patrol from Eagle Pass so that his National Guard can enforce the actual boarding laws.
00:29:51.400Since it's clear that the federal government has no interest in defending the border, he said, I'm just going to do it.
00:29:59.180It's it's not going to fix the problem, but it's the step in the right direction.
00:30:02.560And if more actions are taken, like Greg Abbott's, if he actually does, if this isn't just some kind of, you know, show move, if he's actually going to do this, if he's actually going to start enforcing the border, that's that those are those are real games, right?
00:30:21.460That's not the fake GOP politics we're used to seeing.
00:30:24.020Again, I don't know if Abbott's going to really make good on this, but if he does.
00:30:27.300The more power to him and I hope other people follow him.
00:30:31.260But that's the kind of stuff that could change the dynamic.
00:30:34.580That's the kind of stuff that could actually return you to a governable size where you might be able to reinstitute something of a constitutional republic.
00:30:45.320You could actually concentrate enough people in Texas or Florida or somewhere else where they share enough values, they share enough culture, they share enough tradition and they share enough moral vision where they could forge an identity together and then move forward with a constitutional republic or another form of government.
00:31:06.560Who knows? Maybe, you know, I'm with Joseph de Maestro, that every nation has a has a natural form of government that kind of works with the spirit of its people.
00:31:15.560And some might be a constitutional republic, but I don't think many are.
00:31:19.660I think most are probably monarchical in some way or, you know, or, you know, far less democratic.
00:31:27.820And we see this outside of the West. Right.
00:31:29.560But, you know, I think each people does have a natural sense of the way that they run things.
00:31:34.760And I'm not sure how that will shake out.
00:31:36.520What I'm sure of now is that whether we like it or not, whether it was the intention of our founders or not, whether it's what Republicans want or not, what we have now is a democracy.
00:31:47.500It's very clear that we're ruled by oligarchs through a democratic process.
00:31:53.900And I don't like that. You may not like that.
00:31:56.260But denying that doesn't help any of us just saying, well, it's a constitutional republic.
00:32:00.360Sorry, it's not a republic. You couldn't keep it.
00:32:03.080And so we have to ask now is what works in this scenario?
00:32:07.460What works in the situation we're in now?
00:32:10.480Maybe if we get power, we could change the scenario and make what works change.
00:33:30.960If you don't have a people, then there's no way to control, there's no way to tie the elites to the values of that people.
00:33:38.540So that's kind of an essential thing, which is why, you know, Democrats are working as hard as they can to ensure that you don't have a cohesive culture in the United States.
00:33:47.900That you don't have cohesive traditions, moral visions in the United States, because that benefits them.
00:33:52.120It allows them to become rootless, cosmopolitan, globalists that don't have to be tied to any specific people or tradition.
00:34:00.800Joshua Beebe says, the conservative case for dropping the voting age from 16 to 12, service guarantee citizenship in the future, it's a long way down.
00:34:12.300Yeah, I mean, you know, the only the only problem with the service guarantee citizenship thing right now would, of course, be that the military is controlled by very woke people.
00:34:20.700But yeah, having some level of skin in the game is key, right?
00:34:24.340Having some kind of way to ensure that the people who are making decisions on behalf of your country are tied to the interests of those communities and the country that it impacts.
00:34:37.000And again, the way to do that is to tie the elites to a particular tradition, a particular people, a particular moral vision, and make sure that they're invested in that.
00:34:47.400If the elites are rootless, if the elites are cosmopolitan, if the elites are not tied to any particular idea of the good, then they don't have to do that.
00:34:57.780If they don't have to make any sacrifices when they make bad decisions, then they're going to make bad decisions.
00:35:02.840And, you know, service guaranteeing citizenship is certainly one of the ways to do that.
00:35:07.460But some mechanism by that has to be the case.
00:35:12.180Mitt 20 says, but have you considered voting out the elite?
00:36:04.920I mean, why did you have slave states fighting on the side of the Union?
00:36:08.080You know, why did Abraham Lincoln go out of his way to say it wasn't about slavery in many cases until it became advantageous to use that as a wedge against the Confederacy gaining any kind of legitimacy among European powers?
00:36:22.820And I think you're right to point out that, you know, that you could say the North and South, and that's true.
00:36:27.940In many ways, I think it's more the kind of the urban ruling class versus the rural in many ways.
00:36:35.360Now, that's most, I think, aggravated in the North and South.
00:36:38.680But if you look at Shays' Rebellion, Shays' Rebellion, which pretty much no one talks about, which led to the Constitution and the kind of the destruction of the original government of the United States, the Articles of Federation, that was a battle of the farmers and the bankers, right?
00:36:52.580The bankers and, you know, the kind of more the urban elite who wanted a shipping empire, you know, wanted to be able to collect taxes and centralize government.
00:37:03.880They wanted to be able to pay off their debts. That was a big part of it, too.
00:37:08.180And so, you know, they were taxing farmers, right?
00:37:11.220And the same thing with a lot of kind of the changes that happened throughout America.
00:37:17.140Many times the kind of rebellions that occurred that, again, we don't talk a lot, like the Whiskey Rebellion, a lot of the changes that occurred were in this tension between the rural versus the elite or the urban elites.
00:37:30.120You know, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, you know, that this is a big part of that contention.
00:37:36.500And so I think that that's one of the tragedies of reducing the context of Civil War to just slavery, even though slavery is a big part, is that you don't understand the larger ramifications, the tensions that existed and still exist to this day in the United States.
00:37:54.700KJ says the Constitution only has teeth so long as the religious values and interests of the very limited electorate and ruling elite were aligned.
00:38:05.000Again, we love we love to quote people like, you know, John Adams, who said that the Constitution is only good for religious people.
00:38:18.200All right. Doesn't work for any other. But we don't think about the implications of that. You need to have those interests, the interests align.
00:38:24.380The wider you make the electorate, the more you expand the franchise, the less likely the interests are to be aligned.
00:38:31.860The more likely you're going to have multiple interests that are going to buy for that.
00:38:35.340You might say, well, or, you know, there's a lot of important interests that are added.
00:38:38.720OK, that might be true. But what you're doing is making it more democratic.
00:38:42.380You're no longer a constitutional republic. You're moving closer and closer to those things.
00:38:47.280You may like that change. That's OK. You can advocate for that change.
00:38:50.120But we just can't lie about what that does.
00:38:52.080And we also have a hard time not noticing that as that happens, as that expansion occurs,
00:38:58.180the leaders are less and less interested about kind of their the country's long term interests and more and more interested in factionalism or more interested in the and more and more interested in their own aggrandizement
00:39:11.040because they can play different factions against each other or they can globalize.
00:39:14.740You know, they can expand rather than having to deal with a core interest of particular constituencies.
00:39:22.040Let's see. Friendly says, can you explain the purpose of a system idea as it pertains to outcomes such as Wilkel pointed out?
00:39:31.180I don't think it's as clear as people are saying.
00:39:33.280Sure. Yeah. So I was on Twitter and one one guy had posted.
00:39:39.840I don't know where it came from, but explaining that the purpose of the system is what it does.
00:39:44.900And I said, this is something I have to do a lot.
00:39:48.140I have to explain to conservatives that your education system isn't failing.
00:39:53.080They'll say, oh, we have a failing education system.
00:39:54.960It's not producing, you know, people who are good at math.
00:39:57.900It's not producing people who are good at science.
00:39:59.500It's not producing people who can read very well.
00:40:02.440It's not producing people who can write good papers.
00:40:05.620And the thing is, oh, well, it's failing.
00:41:46.620If they're not doing that, then that means there's an incentive to not do that.
00:41:50.400And if it's doing the opposite, then that means there's an incentive for it to produce that result instead.
00:41:57.040So, a lot of my time is spent explaining to conservatives, no, this system is selecting for something.
00:42:06.120Just because it has a specific name, just because you slapped something, a name on something, doesn't mean that's actually what it does.
00:42:12.960And so, you need to be looking at what result it's intentionally and consistently producing, understand its real function, not just the name that's slapped on the side of the building.
00:42:24.320That's one of the problems for conservatives.
00:42:26.640They're like, well, just reform this institution to do what it's supposed to do.
00:42:29.540Except everything about that institution is now specifically altered to do something else.
00:42:35.180The FBI isn't there to stop crime at this point.
00:42:39.880It still stops some crime, but the FBI is very clearly, in addition to whatever else functions it performs, the FBI is very aggressively an organization created to punish right-wing voters, right?
00:42:53.140To punish people like Trump supporters.
00:43:23.800The FBI is doing what it's intended to do now.
00:43:26.700Maybe not what it was intended to do when it started, but most certainly what it's intended to do now.
00:43:30.680So, the purpose of the FBI, whatever its original purpose, its purpose now is to make a partisan difference when it comes to law enforcement.
00:43:43.800Its purpose is to get rid of people or put people in jail or prosecute people or scare people who vote Republican.