When America’s Founding Fathers conceived of our republic, they drew extensively on the experiences of the Greek and the Roman republics of old. An important lesson was that monarchies, aristocracies, oligarchies, and pure democracies were a bad idea and should be avoided, a key point made by the Greek historian Polybius.
According to Polybius, as men began to conceive of justice and a need for governance, they went in search of a just leader to rule over them. After that ruler passed, they turned to his descendants. But as the monarchy deteriorated, people turned to “rule by the best”—essentially an aristocracy—to bring order. However, in time the children of aristocrats, failing to follow the good example of their fathers, tended to become an oligarchy where the richest among them ruled over a growing poor. When the people revolted against this injustice, they turned to a pure democracy that—when not properly configured—evolved into mob rule where anarchy would eventually prevail. Then frustrated with the downward spiral into chaos and violence, the people would call for a single ruler to set things straight, completing a destructive cycle Polybius termed “anacyclosis.”
Polybius maintained that this evolving degeneration—that began with the rule of one and ended with a dictator—would repeat itself ad nauseum if not interrupted. Polybius’ solution was to assign equal amounts of power to the three “orders” of society—the monarchy, the aristocracy, and democracy—to circumvent the “cycle of discord”, which would be the inevitable result unless interrupted by balancing power across government. Sound familiar?
In 1787 our Founders applied this thinking when crafting a Constitution that was a big step toward a “more perfect union.” To interrupt “anacyclosis” required a republic. And that republic has served us well and should be conserved. For those who know history, its lessons, and human nature, maintaining our republic is vital if we are to protect ourselves from those who would indiscriminately impose their unjust will on us.
That’s the threat modern liberals—now rebranded as progressives—pose today. They seek to weaken our constitutional republic in a slow and steady march to a form of pure democracy where 51 percent of us can easily compel compliance by the remaining 49. They know that representative government is a check on the passions of runaway tyranny. They also know that balanced government—where the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches have enumerated powers to check one another—is very effective in preventing overreach by one branch over another. But when you are anxious to turn America into a socialist utopia that demands people comply with the will of the majority (as post-modern progressives insist,) a republic must be rejected. In the U.S. today, people are awakening to the existential threat posed to our republican form of government.
That threat is prominent in the “woke” agenda that seeks to upend traditional values and norms by imposing a destructive political correctness on America that would weaken our Constitutional rights and our representative form of government, where the people are the sovereign, and the elected leaders are the servants. Woke politicians see themselves as all-powerful, as if they were the majority in a pure democracy with no obligation to act within the construct and constraints of representative government. They think themselves smarter than us and entitled to impose their “enlightened” agenda on Americans, even if we oppose it.
Fortunately, people are beginning to awaken, no longer willing to be badgered into obeisance, kneeling obligingly to the commissars of woke-tocracy. Take a look at Loudoun County, Virginia where thousands of parents of school-aged children are in open revolt against a woke school board. That board has decided that Loudoun students must be instructed in critical race theory, an idea that wrongly postulates that America was founded by racists and remains so to this very day. Moreover, the advocates of this claptrap theory believe that all people who share the genetics of our Founders are hopelessly and inherently racist, indeed white supremacists. This is what these Loudoun commissars want to foist on children there. It’s complete bunk and parents of all races are fighting back.
Not satisfied with that, the Loudoun satraps of the woke empire also want students to embrace a transsexual worldview that many parents—as a matter of public education—find objectionable. Loudoun’s citizens are having none of that either and are pursuing an election recall of the school board.
When King George III decided to impose his version of “wokeism” on the American colonies, patriots stood at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts to fight back. It appears to me that descendants of those patriots now stand in Loudoun County, Virginia where they have decided to fight for the republic that a woke schoolboard thinks is an inconvenience. Patriots disagree.