The adoption of Democracy as a form of Government by all European nations is fatal to good Government, to liberty, to law and order, to respect for authority, and to religion, and must eventually produce a state of chaos from which a new world tyranny will arise.
The above words from the 1931 booklet The History of World Revolution, by Ian Alan Percy, the Duke of Northumberland, sound to modern ears like a prophecy that is now being fulfilled right before our eyes.
Certainly since the end of World War II, and arguably before that depending on the metric, the Western world has been in the “Age of Democracy.” Within that time period, the West has simultaneously decayed into the “Age of Degeneracy.”
The Left, which falsely characterizes democracy as a noble system, celebrates that democratic conventions have become the norm. Yet, under democracy’s stint, the West has gone from being the supreme civilization and force in the world to rapidly falling into the abyss of military irrelevance, spiritual wickedness, mental infirmity, crime, and lawlessness.
This is no accident. We were warned about the perils of democracy time after time by wise voices throughout history, including by America’s Founders.
John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, championed the Constitution in his state precisely because it would not create a democracy. “Democracy never lasts long,” he noted. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.” He insisted, “There was never a democracy that ‘did not commit suicide.’”
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, wrote in The Federalist, No. 10 that “democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths.”
Of course, most readers of this publication understand that the government of the United States was framed, under the Constitution, as a republic, not a democracy.
A republic is rule by law. In the United States, that means the Constitution. And while most republics, including America’s, have mechanisms to ensure that the will of the majority is in most cases expressed, it is not the majority’s whims but the rule of law that is supreme.
Thus, in a republic, the will of the majority is sometimes thwarted if what the majority wants is unconstitutional. The Framers likewise embedded this feature into the federal government to protect all Americans’ rights — including those of the minority.
John Birch Society founder Robert Welch wrote in his treatise Republics & Democracies that the Framers of the Constitution specifically wished to prevent democracy in America:
The word democracy had not occurred in the Declaration of Independence, and does not appear in the constitution of a single one of our fifty states — which constitutions are derived mainly from the thinking of the Founding Fathers of the Republic — for the same reason. They knew all about democracies, and if they had wanted one for themselves and their posterity, they would have founded one. Look at all the elaborate system of checks and balances which they established; at the carefully worked-out protective clauses of the Constitution itself, and especially of the first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights; at the effort, as Jefferson put it, to “bind men down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution,” and thus to solidify the rule not of men but of laws. All of these steps were taken deliberately to avoid and to prevent a democracy, or any of the worst features of a democracy, in the United States of America.
I now wish to answer an important question: Why does democracy inevitably lead to degeneracy? (And our brief experiment in democracy has proven quite clearly that it does.)
Because democracy is a form of idolatry that supplants the laws of God with the desires of man.
Aleister Crowley, the British occultist and ceremonial magician whose work has been highly influential on modern anti-Christian philosophies and spiritual practices, such as satanism, summed up his teachings with the phrase, “Do what thou wilt—then do nothing else.”
Is that not the spirit of democracy? Democracy knows no moral limits or restraints. It is not constrained by God’s word, nor by history, morality, tradition, hierarchy, or even common sense. Democracy is the act of handing over complete political power to the limitless appetites of the masses.
Under democracy, it is not reason or morality that reigns, but that hunger which can never be satiated. It is inherently brute, irrational, animal, and base.
A republic founded upon God’s law is unchanging. A democracy is ever-changing; for the majority may want one thing today and another tomorrow. A republic restrains men’s appetites and worse impulses. A democracy puts them in the driver’s seat.
A republic recognizes the supreme authority of God. A democracy sees only man as the highest authority in existence.
Democracy and Christian society are incompatible. If we wish to save Western civilization from self-destruction, democracy must be done away with.
