When I hear the word republic, the word people comes to my mind. I suppose this is true for most other people who understand both words well enough.
A short dictionary definition of a Republic goes that it is a State in which supreme power is held by the people.
These are seemingly simple ideas.
However, as a layperson to social science, I ask why past experiments at building genuine Republics lost tracks or tractions in so many places and during so many times.
As the layperson, it appears to me that a philosopher or philosophers can put a Republic on a track and some strong men come along to damage it.
It also appears to me that some seemingly Renaissance men can get a Republic on traction and some ignorant men come along to damage the traction.
Was it the philosophers, the Socrates, the Platos, and their contemporaries, who got visions of a Republic relatively the richest or the Jeffersons, the Hamiltons, and their contemporaries that did relatively better?
I say relatively better because evidently, the Jeffersons and the Hamiltons who had the capacity to study the works of the ancient philosophers and subscribe to their visions and envision a future Republic based on those visions also had the capacity to exclude the native and the abducted from the polity of that future Republic.
When I got a chance to watch the Roll Call of the 2020 Democratic Convention of the U.S. the other day, it got seared into my memory as a gem of a Republic that I have had in mind even as a layperson to social science.
I wonder what the ancient philosophers of more than two and a half millennia ago and the Renaissance men of more than two and a half centuries ago would say if they rose and watched the representatives of the people practice democracy in action. I wonder what they would say if they watched this practice of democracy in the age of virtual reality that defied the imposition of a pandemic caused by a microbe, which they probably would have never imagined to become such a hindrance to the practice of democracy.
The Jeffersons and the Hamiltons were able to write the expression "inalienable right" even as they practiced or watched the inalienable rights of the natives and the abudcted violateled so openly. I still wonder the source of the self-conflicting positions of expressing their inalienable rights and fighting for it while at the same time participating in the violations of the same rights of others. It is conceivable that when an island sees a continent, greed gets insatiable. Even today, some future Confederate Generals have the capacity to horde billions in material wealth when millions sleep as homeless people on the streets.
I don't know how far the gem of a Republic that I think I watched in the Roll Call of the 2020 Democratic Convention will go. However, I feel that it looks a reflection of an eternal quest of all members of a Republic worthy of its name where their inalienable rights are protected by the rule of law put in place in the constitution and institutions of their Repiblic and ratified by them. I feel that inaliable rights have been expressed by the representatives who appeared in the Roll Call.
I also think that with those expressed rights, everyone's wish is to endeabor to rise, soar, and march into the future and the future of their descendants. The ignorant members of the Republic may feel otherwise out of the unnatural sense of entitlement to more inalieanble right than those of other members of the Republic.
In the commentaries I heard briefly following the Roll Call, I heard a clever Republican Strategist, Scott Jennings, suggest that the Roll Call has showcased diversity that the counterpart convetion of the Republican Party is like to fail to match. He acknowledged that shortfall while at the same time asking if the Progressives will remain united after the Convention.
I am not going to criticize the upcoming Republican Party's Convention, at least not before watching it. However, when I heard Scott Jennings ask what will unite the Progressives past the convention, or something to that effect, I instinctively reacted that Progressiveness is not a choice but a default in the endeabors of human beings in particular and humanity at large. Progressiveness is science, which was sparked by ancient philosophers and defined what it means to be a human at least more than two and a half millennia ago, according to a study funded by the National Science Foundation.
Perhaps, the ancient philosophers may have been very successful in putting on track the ideals of getting supreme power held by the people and America's founding fathers may have been successful in studying it and getting a traction of it and embedding it in writing the U.S. constitution. Yet, I think that the Roll Call of the 2020 Democratic Party Convention has showcased in virual reality a gem of a Republic, at least from this viewer's singular observation.