Democracy v. Constitutional Republic
I wish I had $100 for every time I heard some uneducated Trump supporter tell me this.
A democracy is a system where governmental power is derived directly from the will of the majority. A constitutional republic is a specific type of representative democracy where the people elect officials to govern, but those officials are strictly limited by a supreme, written constitution designed to protect minority rights from majority rule.
I remember a conservative friend who lived in Hawaii who complained that the native people objected to a project directed from Washington to build something at the top of one of their volcanoes, on the basis that this was their holy land. My friend asked, “Doesn’t the majority rule?”
“Not necessarily.” Trying to make my point in the simplest way possible, I explained, “People have rights. My neighbors like me, but imagine that they didn’t, and 20 of them, a 20:1 majority, wanted to come in here and beat me to death. I have a right not to be murdered. When you think about it, we’re lucky not to live in a country where ‘the majority rules.'”
“Oh. I guess you’re right,” my friend said.
My biggest beef with Trump isn’t the many individual points of failure, but the fact that they are all the product of the mind of a criminal sociopath whose only way of thinking is self-enrichment, normally at the expense of anyone who cannot serve to make him wealthier and more powerful.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson says that our problem isn’t that our children don’t understand science, but that our adults don’t.
At this point in the decay of the American democracy, anyone overtly and publicly critical of Trump who believes he’s not on a government watch list is an idiot.
Two comments:
I met a professional investor today whom I asked for his prognostication about the U.S. economy. He replied that the only thing he’s sure of is the growing chasm between the rich and poor, a point to which we agreed.
The people in Northern Europe and other spots around the globe are miserable? Democratic socialism has been the driving force in making the people of the following countries the seven happiest on Earth (in order).
Here’s an 
What the boob at left is saying is partially true, in that only some people in the rest of the world are laughing at the United States.
