Ideas and their definitions have consequences

Dear Editor:
While I was attending college in the early 70s, America was involved in a war with communist China and North Viet Nam.  One day,while walking to class, I was thinking about the war and I realized we could not win that war militarily. Not because the U.S. was inferior in either weaponry or personnel, but because communism is an idea.  You cannot defeat ideas with guns.
Today, we face a similar war here in the Homeland -- Marxism, in its various forms, versus a Judeo-Christian-based free enterprise system.  
One of the most important “battlefields” in this cultural war is the use of words and their definitions. All ideas are developed by using words. Words have definitions, and the proper use of those definitions in communicating ideas is of seminal importance.
There are those called “post-modernists,” who will tell you that words are defined by your perspective -- “that’s true for you, but not for me.” Although touted by academia as a “new” way of thinking, Protagoras, Greek philosopher circa 5th century B.C., is cited as saying “is to me such as it appears to me, and is to you such as it appears to you.”  One of the truths I tried to impress upon my students, as a humanities teacher of nearly three decades, was: “... there is nothing new under the sun.” Solomon.
There are at least two major problems with the “post-modernist” view: 1) In this column, I am using words to communicate my ideas. If your definitions of the words I am using do not match my definitions, we have no way of communicating. Compound that by having several people reading this, and each one having their own definitions for my words. What you have is complete confusion with the prospect of creating unnecessary conflicts. 2) The perpetrator of such an ignorant idea must believe, or insist, that there are agreed upon definitions for the words he is using to propagate the idea. How else can his ideas go beyond his own head? Post-modernism is designed to convince people who, without a proper education, were never taught how to think; but were, however, taught what to think by using what sounds and/or feels good to determine truth. Such thinking will have devastating consequences for the individual and society as a whole.
All this being said, there are two words I would like to consider as fundamental to the preservation of what is left of our freedoms: democracy versus republic.
Despite the best efforts of our politicians, media, and education system to conflate the two words, the founders never used the words interchangeably.  It is instructive to note the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution do not use the term democracy to describe our form of government. Further, no president distorted these two words until Woodrow Wilson.
In one of the last letters Alexander Hamilton ever wrote, warned that “our real disease is DEMOCRACY.”
Thomas Jefferson: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
In Federalist #10, Madison wrote: democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
In Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary, he defines a republic as, “a commonwealth; a state in which the exercise of the sovereign power is lodged in representatives elected by the people. In modern usage it differs from a democracy or democratic state, in which the people exercise the powers of sovereignty in person.”
Why does the distinction between “democracy” and “republic” matter? Ignorance of our history has made it easier for statists to blur the distinctions that have defined our Republic. Playing upon our ignorance and employing the word “democracy”, progressives in both political parties have effectively begun to convert our republican system, which preserves unalienable and individual rights, to an increasingly socialist system that replaces God-given rights with government distributed entitlements.
1913 -- passage of the 16th Amendment -- progressive income tax                                            highest tax rate was 7 percent on incomes over $500,000 ($11,000,000 in today’s dollar)          1 percent on the lowest incomes -- a graduated income tax is one of Marxist’s tenets.
1913 -- passage of the 17th Amendment -- direct election of senators.                                      Previously, senators were chosen by state legislatures, now by popular vote; whereby moving us away from a republic and closer to a democracy. Originally, the sources of power were divided: House by the people, Senate by the states, president by Electoral College.
Having both houses of Congress elected by the people made it possible for special interests to play a major factor in our government.
In 1935 the Social Security Act completely changed the relationship between the individual and the national government. Over time, it increased the people’s dependence upon government, which expanded the size and power of the national government, eroded individual liberties, and moved us closer to socialism.
It would appear that, incrementally, socialists have effectively manipulated the conversation by controlling the words used to convey political concepts. Over time, foundational words that defined our heritage were altered as a necessary first step towards fundamentally transforming the republic.
Ideas have consequences, and so do words and their definitions!
Irl Gilliland,
Henderson