As reported by the Daily Mail this last weekend, the most disliked VPOTUS in history (lower than Aaron Burr?) said that American democracy is the worst threat to national security, along with climate change. And apparently with those who disagree with her “boss” on anything including the fiasco in Afghanistan, COVID-19, and what time to take a nap.

So very briefly, I found myself in the distasteful situation of agreeing with this… politician.

Of course, when I read the other stories…

‘What do you see is the biggest national security challenge confronting the U.S.? What is the thing that worries you and keeps you up at night?’ Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan asked. The vice president answered, ‘Frankly, one of them is our democracy. And that I can talk about because that’s not classified.’ 

It was obvious she had misspoken, of course, as the California political figure fumbled a few moments later, and adjusted her initial comments, urging the need to ‘fight for the integrity of our democracy.’ 

But she was right, as more than a century has demonstrated. Just as the Founding Fathers had warned, many times.

For example, James Madison noted: “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 have been violent in their deaths.”

But of course, like her fellow ersatz progressives, she worships democracy – or at least the hologram of democracy that conceals the mechanisms of tyranny within its shell. Indeed, she is one of the many poster children for the corruption and evil results of libertine democracy, first in her home state of California and now as part of the Biden regime.

(Which triggers the thought – is she upset that Biden has not yet resigned, and is that one of the reasons she seems stressed out enough to misspeak like she did? Or is she being infected by his growing mental problems?)

Consider what John Adams wrote: “Democracy, will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes, and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure and every one of these will soon mold itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues, and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit, and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.”

He was, of course, describing the kind of anarchy that the last century-plus of black-flag, chaotic “anarchists” have pushed. Including many of today’s AntiFa social justice warriors. Not the free-market anarchism that supports and promotes personal and community and national liberty and personal responsibility.

None of which is essential to “democracy” from Ancient Greece to modern times. The tyranny of the majority has been demonstrated time and time again. (And with modern parliamentary democracies, and coalition governments, the tyranny of a large, entrenched minority has also been shown as a nasty way to live.) And we can find many examples of democracy sliding into mob rule and tyranny and dictatorship.

But there is much that can AND HAS happened before we get to the mob rule and dictatorship – even for the most picky of lovers of liberty. Consider what Ben Franklin is reputed to have said: “When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” Of course, we are well past that point – probably nearly 90 years.

But I think that Heinlein perhaps best summed it up.

“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a “warm body” democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

“‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader – the barbarians enter Rome.

Mine was a lovely world – until the parasites took over.” So said Jubal Harshaw, a character in several Heinlein novels.

So Harris was right – though she misspoke. Democracy IS a threat to the national security of Americans – individually and collectively. Even the fake democracy of the Democrats and other enemies of liberty here today. Indeed, a real and present danger.

On the other thing, if we had a “true, honest” republic in which the votes of “the people” really had any actual value or reality, we would not be in the mess we are today. (But we’d probably be in an even WORSE mess.)