Why the Republic Matters

By David Bittinger

October 16th, 2026

Six months after Frank Sinatra’s death, a little book on his career was published. Why Sinatra Matters was an insightful account of a career intersecting a culture. It was written by journalist and author Pete Hamill, once called New York newspapers’ “columnist-poet.” If the 59-year-long legacy of the singer from Hoboken mattered to you, you’d probably enjoy this book.

The form of that title might sound familiar. According to one estimate, something like 500 – 1,500 unique authors have used some version of the “Why _____ Matters” template to make the case for someone or something. Philosopher Tamler Sommers upset many moral relativists and  critics with his 2018 work Why Honor Matters, which put personal honor at the core of morality.

In 2002, journalist and essayist Christopher Hitchens, who had come of age as a committed British socialist, wrote Why Orwell Matters. That work — even read from my perspective of conservative politics — clearly mattered. It could be appreciated by a free thinker from any perspective.

Read carefully George Orwell’s future-nightmare novel 1984 (published in 1948) or Animal Farm, his allegory of revolution turned to tyranny. The author’s fables of a dystopia created by authoritarian movements are mor chilling and palpable than any horror movie.

My use of the template: Why the Republic Matters.

A republic differs strategically from a democracy. The key differences concern the protections ensured for political and regional minorities, and the checks upon the current majority, whatever that majority might be. My definition there is pedestrian, so here are better ones, written and spoken, expressed with historical erudition and eloquence:

“A pure democracy . . . can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction . . . such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been incompatible with personal security or the rights of property . . . .

“A republic . . . of representation . . . opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”

— James Madison, Federalist No. 10

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

— John Adams, 1814 letter to John Taylor

“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”
— Alexander Hamilton, speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, 1788

. . . a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in water.”
— Fisher Ames, speech to the 1788 Massachusetts Ratifying Convention.

In 2016 the Democrats’ power of pandering was finally threatened by a maverick they initially thought laughable.

But before long they began pushing their bumper sticker warnings about the “threat to democracy” posed by such political opposition. (They probably won’t stop until opposition is stopped.) In a limited sense, their warning is correct. Democrats are justifiably worried about the permanent expansion they demand for their almighty federal government, the one warned against by the founders of the republic.

The “democracy” hysteria is easily understood by recognizing its main promoters. These are Democrats an ideological ocean away from traditional, constitutionally loyal Democrats like John F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, or Harry Truman. They’re now Democratic Socialists, whose “democracy” has a global record of producing nothing but “spectacles of turbulence and contention,” by a government that “wastes, exhausts, and murders itself,” which would surely sink the republic, “a raft, which would never sink.”

If you find Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, James Talarico, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hasan Piker trustworthy guardians of functional democracy, I have a bridge to sell you: the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, whose northern edge connects to Red Square. That bridge was built during the Stalin democracy.

A republic is a magnificent but precarious thing, as was cautiously noted just before the birth of ours by a multiply-talented founding father. (He invented bifocals so everyone could read better.) A good republic is like a good marriage –- of course imperfect, yet over time a stronghold of loyalty, faith and devotion. We must not let it be destroyed by the “Democratic Socialist” revolution, which would first turn the country into a California-model plutocracy, then into a Castro-model autocracy.

The republic matters. Vote to preserve it. It could be good for another 237 years.

-30-

Bittinger is a non-distinguished graduate of Glenbard West High School. (You should see its wall of Distinguished Alumni Awards).

He’s also a graduate of Vassar College’s first coed class, and as a devoted admirer of Mahler, still finds his brilliant, complex symphonies easier to understand than brilliant, complex women.

Comments 17

  2. Anyone wishing to understand our Republic and its constitution could do no better than to begin by reading Federalist Paper #10 by James Madison. It’s the best short summary [8-9 pages] of Enlightenment Political thought and the founders concerns and framework ever written. My HS students [tough read for Gen-Zers] were assigned it every year. In essence, government is a social contract that must insure that the governed have more to gain by working within or staying in that contract than by overthrowing or leaving it. It must function even with bad leaders since they will inevitably rise. How? By limiting the power of a faction, even if that faction is a majority.

  3. Thank you David for your thoughtful and cogent article on our republic.
    The Federalist papers should be mandatory reading for all our high school students, original texts are always better than commentaries, however, with the current reading scores I think you would need a Cliff Notes version, if they could read even at that level.

  5. How sad that recent “grads” cannot read or write let alone comprehend the written and historic words. They just listen to the shiny rhetoric offered by the far left. I yearn for the day when even mainstream Democrats made some sense and respected what we have strived to build over these 250 years. For my adult children and their children I can only hope the future maintains the Republic. I have lasted 8 decades and hope for at least one more before I go but pray this country I love stays the course.

  8. During the foment that resulted in the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran and establishment of what many liberal Iranians thought would be some sort of socialist republic in Iran, the Left wing leaders allied with the Islamic fundamentalists. The secular Left believed it would relegate the Islamists to a minority role, once the revolution succeeded. Quite the opposite occurred: the Islamists pushed out or killed Left wing proponents and supporters to establish the terrorist state that so stubbornly remains in power today.

    Today we see the DSA and its GenZ acolytes embracing the CCP and many dangerous Islamist groups in America. If this trend continues, it’s only a matter of time before history repeats itself. The 2026 and 2028 elections arguable have become crucial to the survival of our Republic. God help us all.

  10. “The people who commit these acts of violence want us to change the way that we live and to change who we are, and we cannot do that,” Krishnamoorthi said.
    The above is the statement of the Chicago Northside politician Raja whose Trump card and Race Card the readers were aware of during his failed campaign for US Senate few months ago, on the failed mass shooting of a 19 yr old white kid in the premises of the Aurora Hindu Temple, west of Chicago. If you look at the picture of that boy, you would say that he had just been feeding off his mother’s milk! Police raided his house and found ammunition and some white supremacist literature and determined he acted alone. And there had been press releases from various minority groups in Aurora all foaming with hate for Trump and blaming him for calling some 4th world countries as a** hole countries that created this atmosphere in this country. And I would say Raja’s political statement that Indians won’t change their way of living is one of the reasons for hate and dragging Trump into this is just an act of political s**t.

  12. This is rich.

    Given his druthers the current occupant would consolidate absolute power in the executive … rendering Congress and the courts irrelevant while banning media outlets who exercise first amendment rights to critique the government and the man who round be king.

    The article omits reference to our Republic’s best safety valve: federalism. Federalism empowers states, cities and counties to implement policies that differ from the federal executive … whoever controls that branch.

    If we’ve learned anything this century, it’s that constitutional checks, balances and separations of power are equally essential to protect his republic from would-be tyrants and bureaucratic apparatchiks on both the left and the right. Reaffirming the founders’ genius on our 250th birthday.

    Undeclared wars are one example. Another is loosing the most lavishly funded, quasi-military federal law enforcement agency in our history on blue states and cities while turning a blind eye to millions of undocumented workers in agriculture, service, hospitality and other vital industries in red states and cities?

    Arguing for our republic: full throated, unqualified agreement.

    Ignoring the ongoing threat from a tyrant who unleashed a violent mob on the capitol after losing an election?

    Ignorance writ large.

    Blindered delusion.

    1. The election was stolen, outright and blatant. And the mob hardly violent. Jan 6 was a non event in terms of violence compared with leftist violence.

      Huge event tho, in terms of resisting an illegitimate government.

      Agree that checks and balances are working fairly well now.

    2. Blindered delusion? Only on your part. The only reason you think that red states are being spared the deportation of illegals is because the red states aren’t sanctuary states and don’t fight ICE when they come for them. They don’t make the news because “the most lavishly funded, quasi-military federal law enforcement agency in our history” doesn’t have to hunt them down in the streets after local law enforcement refuses to hand them over, as in Minnesota, California and NY. The top five states for deportation are NY, CA, TX, IL and FL, and deportations are consistent with the size of the illegal population. Kind of puts the lie to your contention that this administration turns a blind eye to red states.

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