It Wasn't About Democracy

Edward Klein, the pseudonym for Walter Scott who pens the Personality Parade section of that newspaper insert, writes in Parade last week,

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had “the most robust connection. There was a common intellectual perspective and a sense that as Founding Fathers they had launched this experiment in democracy that was working.”

What is this love affair with democracy? The founders hated democracy, especially Thomas Jefferson. He hated any concentration of power and considered democratic rule to be nothing more than a majority forcing its will on a minority. There was a great line in the movie, Patriot, where Mel Gibson states, "why should I trade one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away." I say more here. Mike Munger has more here.

Democracy is not what the founders revered; it was the rights of the individual to be free to choose to live their lives in ways meaningful to them. It was never about living their lives in some way meaningful to some majority - or more likely some minority - diktat.