Democracy in America

“ You weigh opinions, you do not count them, and the beauty of all democracies is that every voice can be heard, every voice can have its effect, every voice can contribute to the general judgment that is finally arrived at. That is the object of democracy. Let us accept what America has always fought for, and accept it with pride that America showed the way and made the proposal. ”

“ V. America—A Republic A Representative Form Of Government Under The Constitution As I stated to you in our last discourse, America is a democracy, but it is also a republic. It is a democracy in its spirit and the power of its people, but in the mode of exercise of the power of the people it is a republic. We often hear America referred to as a “representative democracy”. If America were merely a democracy there would be no fixed method for expressing the wishes or the power of the people. ”

“ In America to-day we are confronted with two parties,—one the great multifarious, unformed mass of the people, and the other the strong, emancipated, cultured American nation, which is at work shaping the democracy. ”

“ In this cooperation, or working together, in government and in all the ways of living we find the spirit of democracy.
This spirit has made America what it is today. It has opened up farms, built railways and ships and great industries, built also mighty cities, and made laws for the protection of property and life. All this men have done through the cooperation that means democracy.
If any man thinks that this freedom gives him the right to trample on others, he is no better than one of the wicked kings of former times. ”

“ The effects, therefore, of a democracy are, first to raise an inordinate ambition among the people, and then to cramp the very ambition which it has raised; and, as I may comment upon hereafter, it appears as if this ambition of the people, individually checked by the nature of their institutions, becomes, as it were, concentrated and collected into a focus in upholding and contemplating the success and increase of power in the federal government. ”

“ To reach this end we must overthrow class prejudice, and realize that justice to all alike is the cornerstone of democracy. We must put aside sectional feeling and create a national ideal by merging the State into the nation. We must learn to look beyond the material prosperity of America and discern her true destiny as the champion of the oppressed, the giver of light. ”

“ What should have been asked of us, at least after the defeat of the Federalist party had made certain, what before was only probable, that America would become a democracy, was a literature which should express the ideals pervading our particular brand of democratic life, [152] a literature which should describe a society in which social distinctions were elastic, opportunity was superabundant, and, for the first time in the modern world, the common people become more powerful than the uncommon. A democratic literature could rightly have been expected from America. ”

“ But upon one point I have made up my mind, which is that, with all its imperfections, democracy is the form of government best suited to the present condition of America, in so far as it is the one under which the country has made, and will continue to make, the most rapid advances. ”

“ In a vast amount of the public discussion of these States, the postulates of Democracy are clearly implicit. Quite as much in reality as the democratic republics of America, are they based not on classes but upon a confusion; they are, in their various degrees and with their various individual differences, just as truly governments of the grey. ”

“ But it was left for these people—these coming Americans—to demonstrate to all the world that America was to be peopled by men and women of different ideals, different hopes, and different ambitions from all the other nations of the world.
16.A pure democracy would be that form of government in which all people of the age of twenty-one years could actually take part in making the laws and administering the government. ”

“ Democracy and republicanism, as we use the terms in these talks, have no reference to any political party, but relate solely to the form of government under which we live.
America is a democracy. It is also a republic, as we shall see in our next talk. ”

“ The United States of America, within itself, must continue the task of making democracy succeed.
In that task the Legislative branch of our Government will, I am confident, continue to meet the demands of democracy whether they relate to the curbing of abuses, the extension of help to those who need help, or the better balancing of our interdependent economies. ”

“ But how about America? Has the great American democracy proved a success, as compared with government by autocracy—for example, as compared with the government of Germany by the Prussian military [57] autocracy, headed by the House of Hohenzollern?
More than a century has passed since the surrender of Cornwallis. Since then in physical growth and material success the democracy of the United States has more than fulfilled the highest hopes. ”

“ This asserts the Jeffersonian doctrine that rule by the majority, while not insuring perfection, is more likely to approach it than any other form of rule, and more likely to preserve individual happiness under law. America, more than any other nation, made the contribution of the ideal of democracy by majority rule to the theory of political government.... ”

“ Class distinctions are accented by national prejudices, and democracy is thereby invaded. But even in the dull brains of great masses of these unfortunates from southern and eastern Europe the idea of America as the land of freedom and of opportunity to rise, the land of pioneer democratic ideals, has found lodgment, and if it is given time and is not turned into revolutionary lines it will fructify. ”

“ I have already observed that the advantage of democracy is not, as has been sometimes asserted, that it protects the interests of the whole community, but simply that it protects those of the majority. ”

“ The democratic nations which have introduced freedom into their political constitution, at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution, have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted,—the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the playthings of their ruler, and his masters—more than kings, and less than men. ”

“ There is no more invariable rule in the history of society: the further electoral rights are extended, the greater is the need of extending them; for after each concession the strength of the democracy increases, and its demands increase with its strength. ”

“ I observed that the equality of conditions is daily progressing towards those extreme limits which it seems to have reached in the United States, and that the democracy which governs the American communities appears to be rapidly rising into power in Europe. ”

“ The American revolution broke out, and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which had been nurtured in the townships and municipalities, took possession of the State: every class was enlisted in its cause; battles were fought, and victories obtained for it, until it became the law of laws. ”

“ But though we may be proud of these conquests, we are compelled in the last analysis of our institutions, to return to a few fundamental notions of our government. We must continue the representative idea based upon the doctrine of the equality of rights and exercised by representative assemblies founded on popular elections; and after our most pleasing contemplation of the institutions of America, we must return to the people, the foundation of our government. Their wisdom and self-control, and these alone, will impart to our institutions that strength which insures their perpetuity. ”

“ The foremost or indeed the sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced as it were to a single principle. ”

“ That the true mission of American Democracy is to maintain the liberties of the people, the sovereignty of the States, and the perpetuity of the Union, by the impartial application to public affairs, without sectional discriminations, of the fundamental principles of human rights, strict justice, and an economical administration. ”

“ Our country is defined by her great people, and our democracy is defined above all else by our Constitution, a Constitution that these individuals want to ignore because they have decided that their judgment, the judgment of a small minority of partisan elites, should somehow override that of the more than 155 million Americans who participated in this election. That, my friends, is not democracy. ”

“ The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. ”

“ How far a republican government can, in a confederated form, be extended, and be at once efficient abroad and at home, can ensure general happiness to its own citizens, and perpetuate the principles of liberty, and preserve the substance of justice, is a great problem in the theory of government, which America is now endeavouring to unfold, and which, by the blessing of God, we must all earnestly hope, that she may successfully demonstrate. ”

“ I have now established, as proposed at the outset, that the government of the United States is a democratic federal Republic — democratic in contradistinction to aristocratic, and monarchical — federal, in contradistinction to national, on the one hand — and to a confederacy, on the other; and a Republic — a government of the concurrent majority, in contradistinction to an absolute democracy — or a government of the numerical majority. ”

“ If the maladministration of the democracy ever brings about a revolutionary crisis, and if monarchical institutions ever become practicable in the United States, the truth of what I advance will become obvious. ”

“ A genuine American national democracy was coming into existence in that part of the country—a democracy which was as democratic as it knew how to be, while at the same time loyal and devoted to the national government. ”

“ American national cohesion is a matter of national integrity; and national integrity is a matter of loyalty to the requirements of a democratic ideal. For better or worse the American people have proclaimed themselves to be a democracy, and they have proclaimed that democracy means popular economic, social, and moral emancipation. ”

“ The public has therefore among a democratic people a singular power, of which aristocratic nations could never so much as conceive an idea; ”

“ One of the most enlightened foreign students of our Government has rightly said that ’America is the most undemocratic of democratic countries.’ We have been living under a Government of negation, a Government with an executive with more power than any monarch, a Government having a Supreme Court, clothed with greater authority than any similar body on earth ”

“ Even the autocratically ruled States, hitherto careless about the people in their underworlds, had to make advances to democracy, and give it some measure of the justice democracy threatened to deal to itself. ”

“ Only by faith in an efficient national organization and by an exclusive and aggressive devotion to the national welfare, can the American democratic ideal be made good. If the American local commonwealths had not been wrought by the Federalists into the form of a nation, they would never have continued to be democracies; and the people collectively have become more of a democracy in proportion as they have become more of a nation. ”

“ If American democracy had done nothing else, it would have proved its right to fame by the fact that it has chosen twenty Presidents, not one of whom has attempted to subvert the government or to override the will of the people in any essential point. ”

“ We Americans are confronted by two divergent theories of democracy. According to one of these theories, the interest of American democracy can be advanced only by an increasing nationalization of the American people in ideas, in institutions, and in spirit. According to the other of these theories, the most effective way of injuring the interest of democracy is by an increase in national authority and a spread of the national leaven. ”

“ The United States form not only a republic, but a confederation; ”

“ I urge you to consider that the display of an immediate disposition on the part of the Congress to remedy any injustices or evils that may have shown themselves in our own national life will afford the most effectual offset to the forces of chaos and tyranny which are playing so disastrous a part in the fortunes of the free peoples of more than one part of the world. The United States is of necessity the sample democracy of the world, and the triumph of Democracy depends upon its success. ”

“ The question, What is a true Republican government? is easily answered. It is a government or institution that is perfect—perfect in its laws and ordinances, having for its object the perfection of mankind in righteousness. This is true Democracy. But Democracy as it is now is another thing True Democracy or Republicanism, if it were rightly understood, ought to be the Government of the United States. ”