“For The People”
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I–VT) claims that voting for New York City Democrat mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani will “create a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
IN FACT, Mamdani and Sanders have embraced the doctrine that a bare majority can seize the property of the people and use the power of government to do most anything else they want. Russian Communists demanded this system and approvingly called it “the dictatorship of the proletariat, a new Soviet democracy for all the toilers.”
In stark contrast, James Madison — the father of the Constitution and primary author of the Bill of Rights — emphasized that “such democracies” are “incompatible with personal security” and have “been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.”
Near the outset of the Constitutional Convention, Madison explained that their mission was to “frame a republican system” of government to protect the rights of individuals from the will of the majority.
In accord with that principle, the founders created a democratic constitutional republic with strong checks on the power of government in order to “guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.”
The Law of the Soviet State scorned that system as “bourgeois democracy” and claimed that “Soviet democracy and the Soviet state are a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic.”
That was pure propaganda because all of the actual power in the Soviet Union was in the hands of a few elites. However, the point remains that communism and democracy aren’t mutually exclusive, and democracy can be used in totalitarian ways that have been embraced by Mamdani and Sanders.
