A Republic Assumes Bad Men. Socialism Assumes Good Ones.

The diagnosis is legitimate. The prescription isn't.

How frequently are we reminded that we live in a democracy?

And now, suddenly, every check and balance has become a threat to it. Not just a threat. An existential peril. The Electoral College. The filibuster. The Supreme Court.

The word is doing work. Madison chose a different one on purpose.

This story starts somewhere that looks unrelated.

From Citizens To Peasants

Victor Davis Hanson’s The Dying Citizen traces six erosions of American citizenship: three that keep it from forming, and three that dismantle it once formed.

The first carries the other five. He calls it “Peasants.”

Citizenship, Hanson argues, is a condition rather than a status. It requires a broad middle class: people with enough property and enough savings so that no politician can buy their loyalty.

Strip that away, and the word peasant stops being a medieval curiosity. A peasant was not simply a poor man. A peasant was a man who worked land he could never own, and who therefore needed a patron more than he needed rights.

The order matters. Unelected bureaucracies and the “evolutionaries” who want our constitutional structure rewritten do not survive contact with a self-sufficient population. They need one that has already learned to depend on them.

They need peasants.

A man who owns a home defends the system that let him buy it. A man who has given up on ever buying one has no reason to defend anything.

Thus, the search for a solution; socialism appears to sound plausible.

This Is Not Just A Civics Problem

It’s easy to blame the pull of socialism, especially for those under forty, on a failure of civics education.

Yes, civics education is lacking. But that’s not all that’s driving this.

When the existing order stops delivering, “tear it down and start over” can sound rational. It is what one could conclude after running the numbers on his own life and finding no path forward.

But grievances do not explain the list that follows. Something else does.

Socialism cannot be enacted in a republic. Sixty Senate votes, fifty state legislatures, a Court that can undo it in a single term, and a president elected by regions rather than cities. A republic is built to make sweeping permanent change slow and difficult, and socialism is sweeping permanent change. The two are incompatible by construction.

So the program is not the first intent. The machinery is. Socialism does not need to win an argument; it needs a system where fifty-one percent is enough. That system has a name, and it is not a republic.

Four proposals are being pushed right now:

1. Expanding the Supreme Court or imposing term limits on the justices

2. Eliminating the filibuster

3. Abolishing the Electoral College

4. Admitting new states to reshape the Senate

These four are mainstream. Each one removes a brake. Collectively they push the country toward what Athens had.

The Government of Athens

Consider what those brakes are for.

1. A fixed court means today’s majority cannot rewrite the referee.

2. The filibuster forces the Senate to find sixty votes, which means finding people who may otherwise disagree with you.

3. The Electoral College forces a winner to assemble support across regions instead of running up votes in a handful of cities.

4. Fixed state lines mean nobody redraws the Senate to suit himself.

Every one of them exists for a single purpose: to make it difficult for fifty-one percent to impose its will on the forty-nine.

That is not a construction defect. That is the design.

A pure democracy provides no appeal. The body that decides is the body that reviews, so nothing can tell a majority it was wrong except a later majority, and only if there is time.

In 427 BC, the Athenian assembly voted to execute every adult male on Mytilene. After another discussion and vote, they reversed themselves the next morning and sent a second ship rowing to overtake the first. Fortunately, it arrived in time. Nothing in the political system produced that reversal except a magnificent speech and better weather.

James Madison ran this experiment in his head in 1787.

In Federalist 10, he set a republic against a pure democracy, where the majority is the only authority, and concluded that democracies had been violent and hostile to personal security and the rights of property.

Pure Athenian majority rule is not a safeguard.

It is the system that safeguards are built to restrain.

What Scripture Gives You, and What It Doesn’t

Scripture does not prescribe an economic system.

What Scripture gives you instead is a set of non-negotiable ends and a doctrine of man that eliminates most of the mechanisms.

The ends are not optional. Deuteronomy 15:11 commands an open hand to the poor. James 5:4 condemns wages withheld by fraud. Galatians 2:10 shows Paul eager to remember the poor. A Christianity indifferent to poverty is not Christianity.

The doctrine of man does the heavy lifting. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart is “deceitful above all things, and desperately sick.” That’s why no concentration of power is reliable. Not in a boardroom. Nor in an agency.

Separation of powers is applied hamartiology. Hamartiology is the doctrine of sin; the Constitution is that doctrine turned into architecture. Madison did not distrust government because he had read Adam Smith.He was suspicious of it, as he understood human nature well enough to create a government designed to restrain the worst aspects of people.

Socialism’s fatal flaw is anthropological. It requires authorities who are not what Jeremiah says they are.

The Kingdom That Works

Scripture describes a government that works. A literal future reign on this earth, with Christ Himself on the throne. Revelation 20:6 measures it at a thousand years.

Everything socialism promises, that Kingdom will deliver.

Central authority. Perfect distribution. The poor cared for. Isaiah 11:4 says He will judge the poor in righteousness and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.

Only with an incorruptible, all-knowing Ruler who judges instantly and perfectly can absolute rule be truly safe.

Only one King will meet those conditions. No human government ever will.

Socialism is a counterfeit of that Kingdom. It promises the throne without the King.

In contrast, a republic makes a different gamble. Not that it will produce good rulers; it will not. But that it will invariably get bad ones and must be constructed to survive them.

Divided power. Staggered terms. A written text that changes slowly and on purpose.

That’s what the four proposals dismantle. They remove the only protection available to people who do not yet have a sinless King.

Where That Leaves Us

Government is not the enemy.

Government is God’s ordering, not man’s accident.

Christians must submit to it, fund it, and pray for it, and Paul commanded all three while living under the rule of Nero.

• Submit: Romans 13:1, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.”

• Fund: Romans 13:7, “taxes to whom taxes are owed.”

• Pray: 1 Timothy 2:1–2, that supplications be made “for kings and all who are in high positions.”

The forty-year-old renter is not wrong to think that something is broken.

He is wrong about what will fix it. Even if the republic has failed to deliver for him; tearing it down will not make it deliver. It is the only thing standing between him and a majority that owes him nothing.

To His Glory,

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