Oligarchy vs. our democratic republic

Bernie Sanders said recently that President Trump’s rule is in effect an “oligarchy” of billionaires. The 83-year-old senator from Vermont stated, “These are the scariest times in my life.”

Sanders told his Facebook followers: “Are you ready for a boring history lesson? Back in the 1770s, the founding fathers of this country, who were nobody’s fools, created a government of checks and balances. They created an executive branch, a legislative branch, the Congress, a judiciary, our federal court system to keep a check on each other.” So far so good.

Sen. Sanders continues, “What is happening now, in a way that is unprecedented, is Donald Trump is accumulating more and more power into his own hands.”

Sanders is correct that the founders of America were very concerned about the overconcentration of power into the hands of a few. An oligarchy is the rule by a few. A monarchy is the rule by one, a king. The founding fathers eschewed both.

James Madison, a key architect of the U.S. Constitution, wrote in Federalist 47 that governmental power had to be divvied up between competing forces, lest one group lord it over another: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Where did Madison get these ideas? From the Bible, which says, “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” The founding fathers were wary of man’s sinful nature – thus, power had to be divided.

When he was a young man, Madison chose to study under Rev. John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister from Scotland, who signed the Declaration of Independence. Witherspoon was the president of Princeton, which was founded by Presbyterian elders.

Witherspoon trained his students, such as Madison, in a thoroughly Christian worldview. That includes the biblical doctrine of man’s sinfulness. That is why power is to be divided up. As Madison noted on the floor of the Constitutional Convention, “All men having power ought not to be trusted.” Witherspoon taught him well.

I find it ironic that Sanders would denounce American conservatives of the present when he has spent a lifetime praising Soviet dictators of the past. They were guilty of what Sanders accuses the president of doing. And Sanders has gotten wealthy by writing books railing against greedy capitalists.

Within two years, thanks to the genius of the founding fathers, every member of the House of Representatives will have to be reelected to keep their jobs as will one-third of the senators. Trump can help stump for those he favors in those electoral contests, but his power is limited. He can’t snap his fingers and make sure his rubber-stamped choices for Congress will make it. Stalin could – Trump can’t.

Bernie Sanders denounces conservative politicians as “authoritarian,” yet he has repeatedly praised Communist leaders like Fidel Castro. Sanders even spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union.

One keen critic of communism in our time is best-selling author Dr. Paul Kengor of Grove City College. I have interviewed him scores of times.

A few years ago, Kengor wrote an article, “Bernie’s Billionaires: Fidel was one of his models.” Kengor noted: “Castro, for the record, was much more than a millionaire. In 2006, Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $900 million and rising. … And yet, all Cuban workers – from doctors to teachers, baseball players, dentists, farmers, janitors – subsisted at a mandated ‘living wage’ of $1,200 per year, while the Castro brothers and a close-knit band of apparatchiks literally owned the island.”

Kengor suggests that those like Bernie Sanders, who think socialism is good, “go to a Marxist country. There, 99 percent of the masses make the same poverty wage, while 1 percent confiscate wealth and property.”

Sanders and others on the left are upset at billionaire Elon Musk for volunteering his time at DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, where his group is exposing outrageous waste, fraud and abuse of government spending.

What Trump and Musk are trying to do is cut wasteful government spending – a result of our nation’s foray into socialistic type policies.

Sanders is correct that the freedoms we have in America come from the founding fathers dividing up power. Because of that, the American people will get to decide at the ballot box whether they approve or disapprove of the work of President Trump and his appointees – unlike with the actual tyrants Sanders has spent his life extolling. And it’s ironic that a socialist like Sanders would decry “oligarchy” when he believes the government should have final say on redistributing all your money.

As Margaret Thatcher famously observed, “The problem with socialism is sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”