Are We Witnessing The Death Of America’s Democratic Republic? By Barry Shaw for American Thinker
Although this journal is called the American Thinker it can be useful to hear the observations of a non-American thinker on what appear to be bewildering and growing problems in America.
Public safety is perhaps the pre-eminent responsibility of government. If a government cannot protect its citizens against criminal members of its society, or even against the unlawful behavior of government itself, that nation no longer deserves to call itself a functioning democracy.
Has the United States reached that point?
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The Constitution, which is the primary document of the United States government, begins, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare….”
These provisions are the basic tenets of the need to maintain civil order and public safety in a nation in harmony with itself. It means providing law and order, protection, and safety for each lawful individual citizen.
The Founders wrote the Constitution that way because it was known that there will be people, or even tyrants, who do not respect their fellow citizens and who are willing to take the law into their own hands. This is especially true if the government fails to provide mechanisms to police against crime and punish it when it occurs.
The outcome of defunding or dismantling law enforcement must, inevitably, lead to a sharp increase in lawlessness and violence. In those parts of America that have aggressively defunded or dismantled their law enforcement, areas that are almost exclusively Democrat-governed states and cities, the social fabric has indeed broken down.
Public safety is too important to be used as a political tool; or as a political excuse to change society with one political party imposing biased policies over its citizens; or as a weapon for the ruling political party to enforce oppressive policies over a population. This is true even if that breakdown in safety is delivered under the guise of benefiting some or all of the population.
If the government’s general misrule, deliberate acts, or incompetence, puts citizens at risk and puts beyond their reach the freedoms and liberty necessary for them to thrive, the inevitable outcome will be that some segment of society becomes lawless. Democrats try to deflect by pointing to “root causes.” Currently, they say that police and guns are the “root causes” of violence. Yet those states with active police forces and readily available access to legal guns are not the states in which street violence is rampant.
Democrat mayors have allowed the mob to occupy sections of their cities in what the media call autonomous zones. We have seen mayors order their police to stand down and vacate areas leaving lawful citizens abandoned, held hostage at the mercy of lawless gangs.
Chicago mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is perhaps the most incompetent mayor in the country, although she gets vigorous competition from New York’s De Blasio, Los Angeles’s Garcetti, Seattle’s Durkan, or Portland’s Wheeler. Rather than examining her own conduct, Lightfoot has blamed everything and everyone for her utter failure to counter the horrendous rise in murders in her city.
Following a brutal weekend of murders and shootings in June 2021, Lightfoot called for the court system to act. This is the same system she used COVID to justify closing. That closure meant dangerous criminals were not brought to court to face charges and, as the prisons were deemed COVID traps, were not even kept locked up pending trial. Lightfoot also demonized law enforcement, even calling police racist.
