Mike Lee wrote:“Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish.”
He's correct.
I just searched The Federalist Papers (
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/fed.asp).
Number of issues in which the word "democracy" appears: 4*
Number of issues in which the word "liberty" appears: 47
Number of issues in which the word "peace" appears: 38
Number of issues in which the word "prosperity" appears: 39
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Number of issues in which the word "sex" appears: 1
Number of issues in which the word "breast" appears: 4
Number of issues in which the word "France" appears: 13 **
* In three of the four instances it's a negative reference:
"Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." - James Madison
"In a democracy, where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative functions, and are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues of their executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on some favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter." - James Madison
"For it cannot be believed, that any form of representative government could have succeeded within the narrow limits occupied by the democracies of Greece." - Alexander Hamilton
** The majority are in reference to commercial fishing, e.g.:
"With France and with Britain we are rivals in the fisheries, and can supply their markets cheaper than they can themselves, notwithstanding any efforts to prevent it by bounties on their own or duties on foreign fish." - John Jay