If you’ve watched any the Republican debates this election cycle, you’ve probably heard one of the candidates say something about how we need a big strong leader in the White House.
This idea, that America needs a strongman type leader, is very popular right now among conservatives.
They really do think that all our country’s problems will magically go away if we have an alpha male (or female) “decider” in the White House.
And while acting or bragging about your alpha male status might get you airtime on Fox So-Called News, it doesn’t actually mean you’ll be a good president.
At least not according to what the Founding Fathers would have considered a good president.
Today’s Republicans have apparently forgotten this, but the Founders were republicans with a lower case “r” who were inspired by examples of democracy they saw all around them.
For example, much of the U.S. Constitution is based on the Iroquois Confederacy -- the five (later six) tribes who occupied territories from New England to the edge of the Midwest. It was a democracy with elected representatives, an upper and lower house, and a supreme court (made up entirely of women, who held final say in five of the six tribes).
The Framers hoped they could create something as successful out of the Thirteen Colonies.
As Benjamin Franklin noted to his contemporaries at the Constitutional Convention: "It would be a very strange thing if Six Nations of Ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union and be able to execute it in such a manner, as that it has subsisted for Ages, and appears indissoluble, and yet a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies."
This kind of fascination with democracy -- in all its forms -- was unique in the early modern world.
Back in Europe, the sort of democracy the Framers were borrowing and inventing was considered unnatural. Philosophers like Thomas Hobbes argued that the world was better off with the rule of the few over the many, even if that meant that the many were impoverished. Without a strong and iron-fisted ruler, Hobbes wrote, there would be "no place for industry . . . no arts, no letters, no society."
Because Hobbes believed that ordinary people couldn't govern themselves, he believed that most people would be happy to trade personal freedom and economic opportunity for the ability to live in the relative safety and security of a strong-man-run state.
The Founders disagreed. They believed in the rights of ordinary people to self-determination, so they created a form of government where “We the People” rule.
leadership obviously had a role to play in this radical experiment in democracy, but the Founders said our representatives true power would come from the people they represented, not from bossing them around.
It’s not an accident that this is still more or less the case 228 years after the Founders got together to write the Constitution.
You see, Thomas Hobbes had it all wrong: Political democracy, not tyranny, is the natural state of humankind.
In fact, it’s the natural state of the entire animal kingdom.
