Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast.

I'm Jeremiah Regan and I'm Juan Dabalos.

We're back with Constitution 101, the meaning and history of the Constitution.

On to lecture number four today, consent of the governed and the separation of powers. I just have to take a moment to make a note here. This podcast is a lot of fun for us to record an introduction on because we are students of the Hillsdale Van Andal Graduate School of Statesmanship, and we are students of R.J. Pastrido, and to get to talk about his work is a blast. And I'm,

I'm hoping that our listeners aren't thinking, I wish these guys would shut up and let us get to

RJ. But we'll keep that in mind and make this brief. One of the great points that Dr.

Pastrido makes in this lecture is the difference between democracy and republicanism and Hamilton

and Madison make that point in the federalist papers.

That's right, because you hear a lot of people, you know, when somebody says that we're a democracy,

you hear a lot of people say, we're not a democracy, we're a constitution of republic. But what's the

difference? That's right. What's the difference? And so Dr. Pastrida is going to go into more detail

on, and that's why he clarifies as direct democracy versus republicanism.

So he's going to make that argument from the founders and tell us how they understood the difference between those two terms.

In many places in the Federalist, Hamilton and Madison both say that the will of the people needs to and will ultimately prevail.

But in a democracy, the will of the people is immediate.

That means any whim, any passion, any mob mentality that takes hold gets implemented right away.

That's a problem with democracy.

In a republic, the people still get their way, but there's some safeguards that they are putting in place

themselves. It's like when you're at your wisest, it's like when you sleep on something before

you make a big decision. That's really the difference in republicanism. The mechanisms do matter.

There's representation and there's checks and balances. But the point isn't that people don't

get what they want. It's that people want the right things and then they get it. And that comes out in this lecture. You should really read the Federalist, dear listener, and you can pick that up at Hillsdale.edu slash course. That's Hillsdale.edu slash course. That will take you to our official bookstore. And in the search field, type in Federalist.

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