You might want to sit down for this, but I agree with James Comey. At least in insofar as he tweeted on Sunday, “Democrats, please, please don’t lose your minds and rush to the socialist left.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old from New York running for Congress, has emphasized an even more bizarre and incoherent argument for democratic socialism over the past weeks since her surprise win in the primary.
But that’s as far as I agree with Comey, and the left-wing media may want to re-evaluate why they’re paying attention to his Twitter feed anyway. Last week, Comey also tweeted that Republicans had shown they are “incapable of fulfilling the Founders’ design that ‘Ambition must counteract ambition.’” How exactly have they shown that? Conservatism is in fact the only political philosophy that can possibly fulfill the Founders’ design, because our Constitution created and established a republic, meaning that we have specifically rejected direct democracy as the best form of government.
[More: James Comey gets roasted on Twitter after advising Democrats not to ‘rush to the socialist left’]
We can observe the problems with additional elements of direct democracy in attempts to bypass our legislature, particularly in the form of citizen initiatives. For example, in Colorado, my state legalized marijuana through direct democracy citizen initiative and the result has been devastating to the state since Amendment 64 was added to our state constitution. This very poorly crafted amendment did not originally contemplate taxes, a per se limit for drivers, and many other necessary components that a traditionally crafted bill would contain. Many other such examples are why our federal Constitution guarantees a republican form of government to the people.
Comey’s tweet was referencing James Madison’s Federalist 51, which discusses the need to limit direct democracy and separate powers of government. The Founders understood that the civil government has an important purpose in society and that its only legitimate role is to protect and preserve the people’s fundamental, pre-political rights.
Democratic socialism is inherently in conflict with the Declaration of Independence, and the founding of America on the Judeo-Christian ethic recognizing that one of the self-evident truths of reality is that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. This includes the fundamental right of humans to self-determine and pursue family, business enterprise, church, and God.
Economically speaking, socialism and democratic socialism differ only in that the former is a precursor to full-blown Marxist-Leninist communism, where so-called democratic socialists want to stave off the inevitable while still negating capitalism and the free market through somehow infusing elements of democracy into a socialist world, thereby merely exchanging one tyrant for mob rule communism.
Neither works. Millennials in America especially need to understand why socialism as an economic theory is so dangerous. Our individual right to liberty and self-governance is essential to a free society. Socialism in any form turns that idea on its head and discourages entrepreneurship and alienates property ownership without individual consent.
Madison understood that in order to best preserve and protect liberty, governments must exist and have sufficient power to accomplish that important function of protecting individual rights (negating a full democracy), but not have so much power vested in one person or branch of government that the government tramples individual rights (negating full socialism and communism). Thus, Madison’s famous line about ambition counteracting ambition, and also from Federalist 51, the idea that government is a complex balancing act:
Socialism has never been shown to work in any society. Importantly, the Founders recognized among the varying types of political philosophies they could have implemented for American government, a constitutional republic was possibly the surest guarantee of preserving genuine liberty. But that does rest on our ability to continue electing government representatives that also understand this and will abide by their oaths of office.
There is great reason to be encouraged that millennials especially are seeing the implicit problems in socialism and the Democratic Party as a whole and reject the fluffy and even absurd remarks from Ocasio-Cortez and the democratic socialist’s platform. Americans must still continue to protect and preserve our constitutional republic not only because our supreme law of the land requires it, but also because it has been proven to effectively provide the most freedom for everyone in every area from religious liberty to a free market.
Republicans in Congress would do well to show us that they understand the mandate for legitimate government as a republic prior to the November midterm elections and continue to effectively and expressly reject democratic socialism as conflicting with our Constitution.
Jenna Ellis (@jennaellisJDFI) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is director of public policy at the James Dobson Family Institute. She is a constitutional law attorney, radio host, and the author of The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution. She can be reached at [email protected].
