Buchanan On Democracy Or Republic

“....Democracy … arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects,” said Aristotle.
But if the Philosopher disliked the form of government that arose out of the fallacy of human equality, the Founding Fathers detested it.
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule,” said Thomas Jefferson, “where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49.” James Madison agreed, “Democracy is the most vile form of government.” Their Federalist rivals concurred.
“Democracy,” said John Adams, “never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
“You people, sir, is a great beast,” Alexander Hamilton is said to have remarked. If he did not, it was not far from his view.
Said John Winthrop, the Pilgrim father whose vision of a “city on a hill” so inspired Ronald Reagan, “A democracy is … accounted the meanest and worst form of government.”
But did not the fathers create modernity’s first democracy?
No. They created “a republic, if you can keep it,” as Ben Franklin said, when asked in Philadelphia what kind of government they had given us. A constitutional republic, to protect and defend God-given rights that antedated the establishment of that government.
We used to know that. Growing up, we daily pledged allegiance “to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands,” not some democracy. As Walter Williams writes, Julia Ward Howe did not write the “Battle Hymn of the Democracy.”
Today, we are taught to worship what our fathers abhorred to such an extent that politicians and ideologues believe America was put on Earth to advance a worldwide revolution to ensure that all nations are democratic........” (Full column here)