CALLER: So, if we give them an alternative, which is either, obviously, a fiscally conservative, socially moderate third party or direct-issue voting, and the average --

BECK: You don't want direct-issue voting. Direct-issue voting is a democracy.

CALLER: I'm sorry?

BECK: Direct-issue voting is a democracy. Democracies have never, ever stood. They -- our Founders did an awful lot of work and an awful lot of study of different systems. Democracy does not work. You need a republic. You can't have direct voting.

CALLER: At the National Taxpayers Union conference in D.C., a few weeks ago, I spoke to a few guys there; I talked to (vice president for policy and communications) Pete Sepp; I talked to some other people. They tend to think that if we had direct-issue voting, we'd get a more fiscally conservative result.

BECK: Well, I haven't talked to Pete Sepp or some of the other people, but I have read an awful lot of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, even Hamilton, Adams -- I have read a lot of those guys' words and a lot of the things that inspired them that shows that democracy does not work.

PAT GRAY (radio host): But isn't he just talking about, like, ballot amendments and things like that? Like -- I mean, I think that sort of thing is great. I mean, you can't do every little bit. I think a democracy fails if you're trying to do every little piece; you have to have representatives there --

BECK: Look, look, look --

GRAY: -- doing their work.

BECK: -- we have the government that quite, frankly, we deserve. We have the government that -- we have direct vote. Here it is: This direct vote just put Barack Obama into office. Congratulations on that direct vote. The last direct vote put George W. Bush in office, and the one before that put Bill Clinton in office.

We, as a people, have turned into, and I don't -- I mean this in the broadest of ways -- I believe that there is a good number of people in this country that still play by the rules, that still pay attention, that try to do the right thing, that think that -- they know what the definition of “is” is. They know that there are some things that we have to do that we don't like, but we do them. Sometimes we don't do things that we want to do because it's not right.

There are a good number of good decent people here, but you know what? As a society, we have been put to sleep by entertainment, we have been put to sleep by wealth, we have been put to sleep by an education system that says “don't worry about it.” “What? No, we're going to use a purple pen, not a red pen, because we don't want to cause any problems.” We have been promised, and we bought the lie, that nothing's hard, and, because of that, we have become a people that just vote in the easy thing, or the guy we want to hang out with, or the guy that seems like fun, or, you know, “I can relate to him.”

That's not what this is. We take our elections as seriously as we take American Idol, and that's a slam, I know, on how seriously we take American Idol. I think we take American Idol perhaps a little more seriously as a people, but once we said in our own lives, “You know what? It really doesn't matter.” I mean, you can be a good guy at work and a bad guy at home, or a good guy at home and a bad guy at work. Well, as soon as we accepted that in our own lives, we started to accept that from our leaders and that's when we became unhinged. We have the directly elected representative government that we deserve.

So, the most important thing that we can do is figure out what we believe and then apply those principles to our own lives every single day. Then we'll be able to spot the good and decent people, and we'll be able to hire the representatives that actually represent who we are and who we need to be again.