OPINION:
America must not lose its identity as a republic in its 250th year as a free nation. Please, voters, get up and vote.
Apathy and indifference will be our undoing. In 1787, as Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, a woman asked what had been created. His famous answer was “A republic, if you can keep it.”
A republic prioritizes the common good and justice, ensuring societal stability. It focuses on how power is exercised: via elected representative rather than citizens voting directly on every law, which is a democracy.
The cycle of government that degrades from a republic is historically explained by Anacyclosis, the ancient Greek political theory of historian Polybius. It was studied by our Founding Fathers and profoundly influenced their vision of the republic they were founding.
Anacyclosis was the culmination of ancient Greek political thought on the evolution of political communities. They observed that hundreds of city-states cycled through several kinds of governmental forms.
A republic degrades to a timocracy, where wealth accumulation slowly creeps into the political system. The lack of self-restraint causes societal fragmentation, the breakdown of interpersonal connections, shared values and trust and the creation of disconnected or hostile groups.
When severe, social fragmentation undermines a society and can lead to increased political gridlock and civil unrest. Lawlessness and passion override reason in a democracy, and it can pave the way for a strong man to restore order. That’s what happened when Hitler took over Germany after World War l.
We cannot allow socialists take advantage of America while we are distracted by social fragmentation. We are a republic “if we can keep it.”
LAURI JONES-CONGLETON
Whitehouse, Texas
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