By Randy Rossi -
Surely our Founding Fathers are weeping in Heaven as they watch Democrats and the “fake news” declare war on virtually every aspect of the brilliant Constitution and Bill of Rights that they left us. Almost every Democrat running for president in 2020 is attacking our freedom of religion, our 2nd Amendment, innocence until proven guilty, our private property, and our Electoral College and state’s rights.
Sadly, our school systems today do a very poor job of helping young people understand how magnificent a gift that our Founding Fathers left us so they don’t understand why these attacks by Democrats are so outrageous and destructive. Our Founding Fathers studied over 2,400 years of failed democracies to find out why the average life of a democracy is only 200 years. I saw John Adams’ and Thomas Jefferson’s huge libraries (John Adams had 14,000 books and Jefferson had over 5,000 books) and their hard work delivered a miracle to address why all previous democracies eventually failed best explained by Thomas Jefferson “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule where 51% of the “people” may take away the rights of the other 49%”. Their solution was to give us a “republic” in which we have a Bill of Rights that “the mob” cannot take away from us which was best explained by Benjamin Franklin when he said “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty (a republic) is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote”.
The 1st Amendment was designed to prevent a state controlled religion and to protect free speech but also to protect our right to practice any religion we wanted without “prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. Yet many states have made praying in school or on public property illegal. The 2nd Amendment was not created for hunting or just a militia; it was designed to be “The American people’s teeth and a keystone under independence” as George Washington explained. Our Founders knew that democracies always turn into dictatorships and therefore “A free people must be an armed people” also said by George Washington.
Our Founders did not want large states to rule the new Republic, so they created an Electoral College which insured that even the smallest states had a voice and control of their own freedom. It is also why each state only gets two senators no matter how big they are. We all watched Democrats try to destroy the right to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty by their outrageous attacks on Supreme Court candidate Kavanagh without one shred of evidence. And we have seen AOC and other Democrats who want to grab 70% of the incomes or the private property of “rich” people to redistribute that wealth according to their wishes which is a direct attack on the Bill of Rights. As John Adams said, “The moment that the idea is admitted into society that property (private property or wealth) is not as sacred as the law of God; and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence”. How many millennials know that the American Revolution started over oppressive taxes imposed by the British government?
Sadly, as Edward Gibbons said in his great book “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” written in 1776 which many of our Founders read; the great Roman Empire fell because of “The insidious poison of free bread and circuses” which today we call “welfare”. The Roman people essentially gave up their freedom in return for “free bread and circuses” and they got lazy and quit working and serving in the military and brought in “barbarians” to do that work. Eventually the “barbarians” decided that since they were doing all the work they might as well take over Rome which they did and that brought hundreds of years of the “Dark Ages”.
Our Founding Fathers knew that freedom is fragile and not free. As John Adams warned us, “Remember that democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide”. He should know since he studied 2,400 years of democracy to see how he and his fellow Founders could leave us with a democracy that can stand the test of time. The 2020 elections will determine if we deserve to keep that great Republic they gave us!