This is an opinion column.
Welcome back to America: Democracy or Republic? It’s the game that will go on forever — because no matter how many times we go through this silly argument, we’ll have to do it again tomorrow.
Today’s contestant is John Wahl, chairman of the Alabama Republican Party. You might know Wahl already for having defiantly voted with a photo ID he made himself and somehow not facing any consequences.
RELATED: Alabama GOP chair used homemade ID to vote. AG doesn’t seem to care.
Before Wahl ascended to lead the state GOP party, he worked as a butterfly farmer in Limestone County. If that sounds made up, it’s not, and he has a YouTube channel to show for it.
Last week, Wahl appeared on the Jeff Poor radio show, where he spoke in circles about what they want to do to you. They, if you were wondering, includes Democrats, mainstream media, elites, globalists, and so on.
Even though most other media are still focused on President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, Wahl and Poor got bored talking about that after barely five minutes, when they pivoted to …
America: Democracy or Republic?
As we have discussed before, the question is complicated as “democracy” and “republic” are not themselves scientific classifications. These aren’t butterflies we’re talking about. You can’t say one of these things is distinct from the other, as you can between a monarch and a hickory-horned devil.
Some will try to argue that democracy means a classical Greek direct democracy. But nobody other than the Greeks and maybe a few neighborhood associations have ever tried such a thing. And nobody ever speaks of direct democracy without putting the qualifier direct in front of it, as Poor did at one point during the show.
But according to Wahl, a democracy is something different than a republic — something dangerous, because it leads to a third category we haven’t touched on before.
“The mainstream media wants us to think of ourselves as a democracy because that leads to socialism,” Wahl said on the program.
For Wahl, socialism is bad — firmly in the they/them category — and something to be avoided at all costs. And we are sliding down this slippery slope, he says, because even some Republicans refer to America as a democracy.
“We, as a party, have allowed this to happen,” Wahl said. “If you go back and you watch Ronald Reagan, every time Ronald Reagan spoke of our nation, he said ‘our republic,’ and we have lost that. Even our Republican elected officials call us a democracy far too often, and we are not.”
If so, things are even worse shape than Wahl might imagine — and imagine is the key word here. Not only have many Republicans spoken of America as a democracy, but Reagan often did, too.
For instance, in his iconic Westminster Address before the British parliament, when he warned democracy and freedom were under threat.
And it gets worse. Not only did Reagan speak of America and our allies as democracies, but he also proposed spreading democracy around the world.
“The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy — the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities — which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means,” he said.
Unions? Universities? The press? Political parties, plural? What sort of liberal whackadoodle was Ronald Reagan, anyway?
If you’re thinking I’m cherry-picking a quote to support my argument, at least the quotes I’m using can be traced back to the people who ostensibly said them.
Wahl can’t say as much.
“Our founders had a very, very negative opinion towards democracies,” he said. I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who said it was two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. And that’s so true.”
But Franklin doesn’t appear to have said that.
A fact check from none other than Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller attempted and failed to connect Franklin to the quote, which appears to have come into existence in the late 1980s before sneaking its way into several books of quotations and later becoming a favorite of memes on Facebook, where Franklin, among other Founders, have been given credit.
Wahl also quotes something he says is scripture.
“It reminds me of a Bible verse: ‘Wanting to believe a lie, they became willingly ignorant,’” Wahl said.
Wahl says that, and perhaps it’s somewhere in the Bible, but I can’t find it and neither could Google and a half-dozen other online search tools.
But this isn’t about who can pull accurate quotes out of thin air; this is about whether America is a democracy or not. And maybe, what a republic is.
America is, as I’ve argued before, a representative democracy and a constitutional republic. These are not mutually exclusive things, no matter how much Wahl and folks like him want them to be. It’s like saying, that’s not an automobile, it’s a car, or that Monarch isn’t a butterfly, it’s a caterpillar.
So if there isn’t such a distinction between democracy and republic, why does it matter so much to Wahl and those like him who blabber the same thing?
Because they want there to be a difference — and that’s scary. When someone tells you they don’t believe America is a democracy, you can stop right there.
They don’t want America to be a democracy.
America isn’t a democracy, it’s a republic shows up in my email inbox at least once a week, but when the head of a state political party says it, we should pay attention. Wahl might not be a serious person we’re dealing with, but it’s still serious business.
“Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression,” Reagan said. “Yet optimism is in order because, day by day, democracy is proving itself to be a not-at-all fragile flower.”
When Reagan said that, he was speaking of the Soviet Union and its allies as the enemies.
Today, the threat is coming from inside the house.
Just because this game is silly, that doesn’t mean the stakes aren’t high, and it only goes on forever if democracy wins.
