I'm sure many of us were either not born yet or too young to care that some guy named Dan Smoot was leading the charge to spread the word about the difference between a Democracy and a Constitutional Republic. It's been 61 years since his commentary was videoed and I think it's time to revisit his words:
On April 18, 1966, Dan Smoot gave a talk on the difference between a Constitutional Republic and a Democracy. Here is a transcript of that talk (the video is below):
A constitutional republic, not a democracy. The ideal of a democracy is universal equality. The ideal of a constitutional republic is individual liberty.
A democracy always degenerates into dictatorship which promises government guaranteed equality and security; but, it delivers nothing but poverty and serfdom for the people it robs and rules.
America was founded as a constitutional republic, to safeguard the liberties of the people against the tyranny of democracy or a one-man dictatorship.
In this century great strides have been made toward the goal of subverting our republic into a democracy. The foremost of tactic of the subverters is the subversion of language. By calling America a democracy until people thoughtlessly accept and use the term, the totalitarians have obscured the real meaning of our principles of government.
That is a summary of my [Dan Smoot's] report on a constitutional republic not a democracy. The film report after a message from my sponsor.
A democracy is a political system in which the people periodically, by majority vote at the polls, select their rulers. The rulers then have absolute power to make whatever laws they please by majority vote among themselves.
In a constitutional republic the people also, by majority vote at the polls, select rulers who make laws by majority vote among themselves. But, the rulers cannot make any laws they please because the Constitution severely restricts their lawmaking power.
The ideal of a democracy is universal equality. The ideal of a constitutional republic is individual liberty. In this century great strides have been made toward the goal of subverting our republic and transforming it into a democracy. The foremost tactic of the subverters is subversion of language. By calling America a democracy until people thoughtlessly accept and use the term, totalitarians have obscured the real meaning of American principles of government. Note the following passages from a recent article distributed by the New York Times News Service, quote:
in the United States and in other leading democracies recent years have seen perceptible growth in executive authority. As society becomes more equalitarian it tends, increasingly, to concentrate absolute power in the hands of one single man. This is a voluntary surrender of a free people escaping from freedom to one autocratic master.
And note the following from Gunnar Myrdal's An American dilemma, quote:
In America, liberty often provided an opportunity for the stronger to rob the weaker. Against this the equalitarianism in the American creed has been persistently revolting. And in the conflict between equality and liberty equality is slowly winning. In America, conservatism has, to a great extent, been perverted into a cult of the Constitution. This is unfortunate since the Constitution is, in many respects, impractical and ill suited for modern conditions. The worship of the Constitution is also a most flagrant violation of the American creed. The Constitutional Convention was merely a plot against the common people.
Now Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish socialist, was hired by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1937 to direct a study of the Negro in the United States. He engaged a large staff, some of them Communists and pro-Communists, and An American Dilemma resulted, first copyrighted in the United States in 1944.
In 1954, the Supreme Court handed down his school segregation decision which deliberately violated the Constitution [an index to my articles on the US Constitution is found in my November 11, 2025 ANP Article], reversed a previous Supreme Court decision, and lit a fuse touching off explosive violence which has been shattering our society ever since. The court cited An American Dilemma as one of the modern authorities on which it relied, in preference to the Constitution, for justification of its decision. An American Dilemma, written by Swedish socialists, provided a basic rationale for the conversion of our Free Republic into an equalitarian democracy. Myrdal contends that the American Declaration of Independence, 1776, proclaimed the ideal of an equalitarian democracy; because it contains the phrase all men are created equal.
Eleven years later the Constitution was created, not a democracy founded on the idea of equality, but a Republic founded on the ideal of liberty. This is why Myrdal says the Constitutional Convention was merely a plot against the common people. But he, and those who parrot his ideas, are either ignorant or dishonest. The Constitution was ordained specifically to safeguard the principles of liberty proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence [discussed in my August 24, 2025 ANP Article].
The Declaration sprayed all men are created equal; it means that men are equal before the law and before the Creator, regardless of their inequality in human society. The Declaration says that men are endowed with unalienable rights and that the purpose of government is to secure these rights. The unalienable rights of man enumerated in the Declaration of Independence do not include equality. But they do include liberty, along with life and pursuit of happiness.
Equality of all men in the eyes of God, and before the law, is a condition essential to freedom, but no other kind of equality is possible. Government efforts to achieve material equality will produce crushing tyranny but will not make people equal. The writers of the Constitution were anxious to safeguard liberty against dictatorship, monarchy they called it; but their chief anxiety was to protect the country against democracy.
Edmund Randolph, delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Virginia, said the general object of the Convention was to provide a cure for the follies and fury of democracy.
Elbridge Gerry [discussed in my July 17, 2025 ANP Article] and Roger Sherman [discussed in my July 12, 2025 ANP Article], delegates from Massachusetts and Connecticut, urged the Constitutional Convention to create a system to eliminate the evils that flow from the excess of democracy.
Alexander Hamilton, delegate from New York, said we are now farming a republican government, real liberty is not found in democracy, if we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.
John Adams [discussed in my July 22, 2025 ANP Article], one of the Giants of the American Revolutionary period, said democracy will end the all, contend with all, endeavor to pull down all and when, by chance ,it happens to get the upper hand for a short time democracy will be revengeful, bloody, and cruel.
Speaking of pure democracy in which the people, by majority vote, act as their own lawmakers instead of electing representatives to make laws; James Madison said such democracies have ever been incompatible with personal security of the rights of property. A republic promises the cure for which we are seeking. Madison, known as the father of the Constitution, knew and said that enlightened men will not always be at the helm of government to serve as proper guardians of the public weal. He knew that unlimited political power cannot safely be entrusted to the nation's elected representatives to use, as a majority of them see fit; because, he said, a majority of a group of men is far more likely to be tyrannical than one man is; in a democracy, if a majority should develop hatred for all blue-eyed babies and order them eliminated the babies could be legally executed because whatever a majority wants at any given moment is supreme law of the land in a democracy. How can liberty be safeguarded against the mindless soulless tyranny of majority rule when government is founded on the principle of majority rule?
Jefferson [discussed in my July 21, 2025 ANP Article], answered that one: in questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief with a chain to the Constitution.
In short America was founded, not as a democracy, but as a constitutional republic. We pledge allegiance to the Republic, for which our flag stands, not to a democracy. The Constitution requires a Republican form of government for all states, but does not mention democracy, and neither does the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights [summarized in my March 20, 2026 ANP Article].
The Constitution is a binding contract, enumerating limited powers which the federal government can legally exercise prohibiting it from exercising any power not read in the contract. It denies federal officials the power to do whatever they claim to be necessary for the general welfare. Federal action not clearly authorized by the Constitution is illegal, even if approved by an overwhelming majority of the people, because all the elastic powers of government are left with the states.
Ultimate power to change the organic structure of government, laws left with the people, but the means of making changes amending the Constitution were carefully prescribed to militate against hasty, unwise decision, by the people. As Benjamin Franklin [discussed in my August 1, 2025 ANP Article] left the Statehouse in Philadelphia on the closing day of the Constitutional Convention, a woman asking what kind of government the convention had given America and Franklin replied a republic if you can keep it. Very old and very wise, Franklin saw through the mists of time to the day when Americans might trade their freedom in a constitutional republic for the promise of government guaranteed equality and security in a democracy. And beyond that, to the day when democracy in inevitably degenerates into dictatorship, guaranteeing nothing but poverty and serfdom for the people it robs and ruins.
The American constitutional system, unique in history, enabled Americans to develop a backward continent into the most magnificent nation at all time. The system was designed to prevent both tyranny by government and reckless rebellion by the people. We must restore it and keep it.
And what can you do toward that end? Your job, you who care and understand, is to help educate others. I suggest that you might find a subscription to my report helpful; the Dan Smoot Report, on which these broadcasts are based, is sent every week through the mails and will reach you long before the broadcast does. It contains documentation in details I cannot put on the broadcast. You can read it, make up your own mind, pass it on to others. I think it may be an effective tool for you to use to help educate and activate others; and, only by this means, can we restore our Republic.
He worked odd jobs for the next 6 years (from ages 11 to 17). In 1930, he enrolled in the YMCA to begin High School. In January 1931, he received a scholarship from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He moved to Dallas, Texas and graduated in 1938. From there, he went to Harvard University for postgraduate studies.
On August 11, 1933, Dan married Bertha Maybeth Evans (1917-1994), and, yes, she was 16 when they married and he was 20. The couple had 1 child, Bernard Evans Smoot (1943-2007). They divorced sometime before 1971.
Dan dropped out of Harvard in 1941 to enlist in the US Army to fight for the US in WWII. There was only one problem, the US Army rejected him for medical reasons. But, Dan was not deterred! He pursued a position as an FBI agent, which he held from 1941 to 1951, when he resigned to become a political commentator.
Dan attempted to achieve political office but was unsuccessful. He was much more successful with his career as a political commentator. He published The Dan Smoot Report (a weekly newsletter that turned into a 15-minute radio program - one episode of which is at the end of this article with some volumes of of the report are available on amazon. Dan's political leanings are what was called 'constitutional conservative' and is known as one of the 4 most prominent extremist broadcasters of his time (the other 3 were H L Hunt, Billy James Hargis, and Carl McIntire). There are many videos on YouTube of speeches and talks that Dan gave both through his show as well as at special appearances.
In 1971, he married Virginia Constance McKnight (1914-1996). It appears they had no children.
In 1972, Dan was campaign manager for the unsuccessful campaign of John G Schmitz for President representing the American Independent Party. John previously served in the US House of Representatives for CA's 35th district as well as in the California State Senate.
Dan died July 24, 2003 at age 89 in Tyler, Texas. He is interred at Holly tree Cemetery, Holly Lake Ranch, Wood County, Texas.
But Dan Smoot is not the only person who has spoken out about the difference between a Democracy and a Constitutional Republic.
The Ayn Rand Institute hosts a YouTube channel with videos of Ayn Rand's appearances and ideas. The video (below) is Ayn Rand answering 2 questions on a radio program: Why is a republic more proper than a democracy? And Would a representative democracy worsen or lesson the flaws of democracy? Here is the transcript of her answers:
0:14 Why is a republic more proper than a democracy?
Well because we have to Define our concept clearly. A democracy, in the political meaning of the word, the original meaning defining a specific political system, means a country governed by unlimited majority rule. A democracy is a form of government in which the majority has the right to vote on anything and to pass any laws they see fit. The sole standard of legality being a majority vote that is counting of numbers. Democracy is incompatible with the Constitution because the principle there is that the sole standard of right or wrong in politics is a counting of noses. A majority rule.
The best example of that system are the original city states of Greece, where, if you remember, the majority had the right to vote a death sentence for a man if they disapproved of his ideas. And Socrates is the best example, most famous one, of what is wrong with the system of democracy. Socrates was condemned to death because the majority of the citizens found that his ideas were subversive to the use of Athens. And he refused to escape though he had a chance. He declared that his fellow citizens were wrong in their decision but they had the right to vote away his life; which is a ghastly the example of the sanction of the victim and a perfect example of the nature of a democracy as a political system of government.
Now a republic, properly, is a system of government which is limited by the individual rights of men, which means that the majority may vote but only in a strictly limited and defined political sphere. And that the individual rights of men are not subject to majority vote not to government legislation. All that the government can and should do in regard to rights is protect them. But government cannot infringe them. That is in essence the nature of proper republic.
2:36 Would a representative democracy worsen or lessen the flaws of democracy?
I would say worsening them if anything. If by representative democracy you mean a system which is based on the Democratic principle of unlimited majority rule but merely delegates that power to the chosen Representatives rather than to the direct vote of the citizens. Is that what you mean? No, that would be even worse; because, for a large country a majority would not be likely to agree on some vicious legislation whereas a small chosen body of Representatives, unguided and unlimited by any restricting principle, is the pattern of a tyranny. Then your representatives, in the name of the alleged majority, may be guilty of any form of violating individual rights, of establishing complete status tyranny, yet it would be consistent with your principle - if the principle is unlimited majority rule.
Those are some of the exact words used by Google’s censors, aka 'Orwellian content police,' in describing many of our controversial stories. Stories later proven to be truthful and light years ahead of the mainstream media. But because we reported those 'inconvenient truths' they're trying to bankrupt ANP.
