First, the Founders’ rightly and clearly feared the dangers of democracy as it was seen in Populist, violent uprisings like Shay’s Rebellion and in nightmares of pure democracy that were later borne out in the French and Russian Revolutions. However, that said, they forthrightly defended the notion of democracy as understood in the Declaration as “all men created equal”. What they wished to protect against in democracy was specifically when a majority becomes a mindless, visceral mob, unfettered and trampling the unalienable rights of the minority, especially it’s property rights, as the Dems are so wont to do using the IRS as their enforcement tool and their “entitlements” as their excuses. It is this kind of populist democracy that all Democrats seek to appeal to in their arguments for “fairness”, “equality of outcomes” and wealth envy.

The protections of the minority, deliberately put into the separation of powers and the Constitution’s Bill of Rights clearly don’t apply when discussing the inexcusable theft of taxpayer money to fund left-wing, partisan media outlets like NPR and PBS. These do not need protections from the fickle vicissitudes of politics. Au contraire, it is the citizenry, and their pocketbooks whose protection was intended by the founders, from rapacious “progressives” who amass power in a democratic majority or through the hustings of a kleptogcratic, permanent central bureaucracy which cares nothing for the Constitution which if abided by would only limit them from their kleptocratic, regulatory indulgences. (Now that Cap and Tax is dead watch the EPA to see this strategy in spades.)

So, Ethan, you’re point on democracy and it’s discontents is taken, but you sought to apply it to the wrong victims, in a rhetorical sleight of hand. It is NPR who is the ruling class thief and the American public who are the pursesnatcher’s victim.

On the other point about the writers’ “absolutist defense”; well, that’s just you throwing up a straw man and being reductioninst in your reading of the article. Clearly, anyone who’s read “Miracle at Philadelphia” or the Federalist Papers or the state debates on the ratification of the Constitution should know that the Founding generation was much more interested in persuading their fellow Americans than those in either party are now, but especially in the Bolshevik Democrat Party, which doesn’t even seek to persuade at all, but merely ram things through using bribes, threats and skullduggery and then insult the citizenry as being mental midgets whose minds are clouded by fear of “the new”, who can’t comprehend their brilliance when their machinations to reduce and eliminate liberty and choice aren’t embraced by the American public.

There is no empire. The ratio of military expenditure to domestic product is 0.05. Bar two brief periods (ca. 1948 and ca. 1997) the number of men in uniform is as small as it has been in 70 years.

Neo-Conservatives are the normative Republican candidates. And Neo-Conservatism has its own axioms of self-evident goodness. The most dominant being Military Exceptionalism. By extension, maintaining the obsolete and unaffordable American Empire project using the unassailable National Security State Leviathan is paramount to the perpetual war Republicans.

Hardly a philosophy George Washington would have supported.

Democrats – Free Lunch and Free War. Republicans – Free War and Free Lunch. I don’t see a single Washington among any of them.

When was that time, exactly? Maybe one should read what the Founding Fathers wrote about “democracy”.

Our system of government was designed from the very beginning to insulate certain aspects of the state from “the messy ‘vicissitudes’ of political life”. The purpose of the Constitution was to balance the interests of democratic accountability and elite responsibility against one another.

One may reasonably debate whether our current system has developed too strongly in the direction of elite rule — or one may argue the opposite, perhaps citing the effects of ballot initiatives in California, or the degeneration of the U.S. Senate after the 17th Amendment.

But such debates are matters of prudence, and an absolutist defense of an idealized democratic America doesn’t add much substance to them.