Shocking will to foist democracy on the United States republic

Isaiah Sterrett, in “Antonin Scalia as Teacher of Democracy”, National Affairs, Number 69, Fall 2026, spectacularly misrepresents the United States republic. His essay excludes the word “republic” and features “democracy” 55 times. The United States republic provides for adult citizens to vote for constitutional representatives, who govern, subject to law.

Correctly claiming that Scalia held democracy a violence against life and property, Sterrett writes that democracy never pursues an achievement, sometimes must yield to responsibility, and may be restrained only by civic citizens. He diabolically extolls “democratic self-governance”, typically overlooking physics and its progeny, which constrain the consequences of human choice. Through research, the people discover and adopt the laws of physics, in order to achieve goodness.

Sterrett holds Christianity a “force for good”. However, so far, Christianity has missed its opportunity to fulfill Genesis 1:26-28, 31 NABRE (New American Bible Revised Edition) and its directive:  On earth, humankind is in charge of order (goodness). The United States republic, its Constitution ratified on December 15, 1791, accommodates Genesis 1’s mandate.

The republic’s intentions to goodness are expressed by the civic faction, who accept the Constitution’s preamble, “to ourselves and our Posterity”. Thus, only “We the People of the United States” pursues the “self-governance” Sterrett glorifies. The civic faction focuses on preserving each other’s lifetime opportunity to pursue goodness rather than either practice badness or tolerate evil.

The people who pursue rights, privileges, and entitlements are not of the civic faction, who accept the power, authority, and responsibility to fulfill Genesis-1’s mandate. In the struggle between activist justices versus originalists and textualists, either Congress or the states rather than the people, may and can legislate to either fulfill or amend the Constitution. The amendment process is designed to defeat erroneous democracy, or temporal opinion.

Natural law – faith and reason – yields to that power which constrains the consequences of human choice. For example, “heaven” restrained humankind to earth until research yielded jet propulsion. Now, NASA plans to place an energy-producing nuclear energy plant on Mars in the quest to prevent catastrophic war on earth. Humankind pursues the ineluctable truth: to be neither changed, nor avoided, nor resisted.

Writers who try to foist democracy onto America may and can consider that the civic faction commits to the United States republic.

Copyright©2026 by Phillip R. Beaver. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the publication of all or portions of this paper as long as this complete copyright notice is included.