Republic vs Democracy

Democracy and Nobility

ALLEN C. GUELZO

19 MIN READ

January 05, 2015 12:00 AM

Americans love revolutions. Our national identity began with a revolution, and a revolutionary war that lasted for eight years; and we cheer on other people’s revolutions, as though we find satisfaction in multiplying our own. “I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing & as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. “No country should be long without one.” An excited James Garfield, in his maiden speech in the House of Representatives in 1864, asked whether his colleagues “forget that the Union had its origin in revolution.” Ralph Waldo Emerson thought of revolution as the authentic instinct of humanity. “Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution,” he said in his Harvard Divinity School address of 1838. “The old is for slaves.”

But sometimes our enthusiasm for revolutions blinds us to what is, and what is not, genuinely revolutionary. The English geologist and traveler George Featherstonhaugh took the temperature of American revolutionary fervor and dismissed it as mere patriotic puff, designed only to “stimulate that national vanity and self-sufficiency which are often so conspicuous in young countries, and to cherish in his fellow-citizens that inflated feeling of superiority over other nations.”

 In other words, our revolution was a revolution against a revolution, and in defense of an already-existing (albeit de facto) democratic order.     https://www.weeklystandard.com/allen-c-guelzo/democracy-and-nobility