This is such a tiresomely disingenuous argument that doesn’t get any more palatable for being almost constantly reiterated by people who think they’ve discovered some obscure political principle. The “people who created the country” (for very imaginative definition of ‘created’) had no problem with “the masses” voting, provided that they were the correct ethnic heritage and gender. For the most part, all white male citizens over the age of 21 could exercise the franchise (some even utilizing the vote of their “3/5ths of a person” human chattel), and others could not because they were not considered full citizens with all rights and privileges under the law, i.e. women, “Coloreds”, “Red Indians”, “Celestials”, et cetera). You may have missed in history class that we have since come to a point of being more inclusive in who the Constitution protects and and the law recognizes property rights, and thus the franchise was equally extended, including to those whippersnappers who hadn’t achieved full adulthood by making it past twenty-one summers.
The United States is certainly a republic; it is also run under the general lines of representative democracy in which the adult public can select their representatives and senators to reflect their consensus position on various legislative and policy matters. influence and control by people like Trump and (especially) Elon Musk, who have achieved sufficient political power through wealth and manipulation of not just public opinion but those business interests who wished to hold sway over governance by patronizing key government executives and marginalizing power of the legislature and courts are exactly what the Founding Fathers (well, most of them, anyway) sought to avoid by distributing government authority across three distinct branches.
I welcome your rebuttal but I suggest you review some sources that don’t come straight from the Ron Paul College of Political Pseudo-Science.
Canada has many flaws; but in theory even wealthy individuals, big unions and massive corporations cannot spend too much to woo Gordon Sixpack. (individuals $1725, unions $150,000?). Third party groups come out with snarky commercials, but nothing like the US. Canada has more corruption than many think, but has done a fairly good job of keeping dark money out of politics.
Citizens United, as mentioned, is what really opened the floodgates. But the bigger issue is social media. There are many very wealthy Americans who have tried to influence politics for three and a half centuries. But they couldn’t message millions of people many times a day simultaneously. How much it cost Musk to do this depends on definitions, but it could be argued he spent nothing on a marginal basis, even if there were stronger financial campaign laws.
People thought that the checks and balances of divided duties would act as guardrails on the executive. That norms around longer term, powerful positions would not be dismissed at the start of a new term. That the media, old then new, would also offer resistance. That there was a Senate and a House to win over. That public opinion, shame and tradition would play protective roles.
Some of this is still true. Not every House member wishes to be seen as a puppet. Public opinion still matters. Maybe the Court is less accommodating than it sometimes appears. And Trump probably wouldn’t like the suggestion someone else is calling the shots. Or even is sharing the spotlight too often. Over time this may start to grate.
Campaign finance reform is unlikely now. And might not have affected popular platforms anyway. So let me make an offer to American Dopers to help join the Eleventh Province of Canada. I know many Americans would welcome some slight restoration of politeness and decency. However, some conditions apply:
Americans must accept good bagels are Montreal style, not New-Yorkais. Montreal bagels are thinner, honeyed and wood fired.
Southern courts and schools must now put up a portrait of Terrence and Philip.
You will get used to bags of milk.
Each of the forty-nine Southern Ridings (and the Northwestern Riding) will have to adopt single-payer health care and learn to enjoy vinegar on their freedom fries.
One thing to remember is that primarying someone can be a double-edged sword. In many jurisdictions, a really wackadoodle candidate might just cost a seat. Cf. Kari Lake.
Assuming Trump’s economic policies fail as badly as I expect, there could be a real blue wave in two years.
Words change, modify, and accrete meanings over time. Insisting that a word must adhere to an older definition after that has fallen into minority usage simply disembowels understanding.
They also thought that democracy was incompatible with modern notions of liberty. The moderns had, they thought, discovered the secret of liberty: it was best protected by dividing power. But democracy entailed the concentration of power, so opened the way to the tyranny of the mass.
History and the mass rolled right over them, with actions the founders would definitely have defined as tyranny of the mass. By the early 19th century, the mass gained additional power, additional rights, and additional access to voting. Within some founders’ lifetimes America became the dictionary definition of “democracy.” For 200 years it has touted itself as the home and defender of democracy, screaming the word at every other country, even - occasionally and much against its will - demonstrating democracy within its borders.
Any attempt to redefine America in strict political theory terms must at least acknowledge the history and current context of those terms, and therefore combine them with other terms that such theory demands. But mixing theory into discussions of reality serves no useful purpose.
We live in a lot of types of republic. It’s a democratic republic, a technocratic republic, a plutocratic republic, a noocratic republic, etc.
There are bad types of agendas like trying to take advantage of the majority, for the benefit of the few. There’s no noble purpose in that and so we are NOT, by any intent of the Constitution nor of the framers, a kleptocratic republic. Any attempt to push us that direction goes against the very first sentence of the Constitution. But there are lots of good agendas like making sure that the nation is prosperous - so we need to give the prosperous some input; making sure that the nation is fair - so we need to give minorities some input; making sure that the our initiatives aren’t wasteful - so we need input by the professionals; and so on. We are all of those sorts of republics, because that’s just good and best suits the welfare of the nation.
In the best form of Republic, you’re ensuring that all of these forces have a way to surface themselves in some way. Enfranchising the poor gives them more voice than if they didn’t have a vote at all. Allowing lobbying gives any particular group - doctors organizations, science organizations, industries, etc. - a chance to have a voice. The whole system is devised with an eye towards achieving lots of different goals, so that we don’t make choices that blast away multitudes of important concerns, just to satisfy one.
The people should be enfranchised in the vote. Saying that we’re a republic doesn’t denigrate nor deny that. Anyone who reads it otherwise is inserting meaning into the discussion that isn’t there. Forming views on the basis of false and imagined content never serves anyone for the better.
But we aren’t purely a democratic republic. It’s not our #1 goal. Our #1 goal is given in the very first sentence of the Constitution and our strategy is through creating a republic that balances all of a multitude of concerns.
Done. I like vinegar on fries, I don’t drink milk but bagged milk is ok with me, I’d totally love the health, the rest? I’m easy going it all sounds fine to me.
There is SOME truth to that. However, I believe there previously was at least some general attempt to respect precedent, and to craft a solid basis other than “We want THIS outcome.”
More often than not, yes…and “more often than not” is enough to lead a country in the direction you want it to go. Pointing out individual examples where things sometimes go the other way is a deceptive way to say that, because it doesn’t work every time, that is evidence that it doesn’t work at all.
Indirect ways of selecting leaders, such as the original idea of having state legislatures elect federal senators, and the electoral college, are how our republic is designed, but are not the essence of what it means to be a republic.
From another perspective, we live in a republic because the founders did not understand how well a constitutional monarchy works. They thought George III had the power of a tyrant, and acted as one, when parliament was actually in charge.
If the framers of the Constitution could have seen how British history played out, and then saw how Elon Musk destroyed a complex vital compromise in their beloved Congress, and also how his unauthorized-by-Congress Department of Governmental Efficiency plans to reshape the government created by Congress, they would see that oligarch Elon Musk is a bigger threat to free government than any modern British king.
However, it’s also possible that Tesla’s PE ratio will soon collapse, with Trump then shunning a loser. Then my last paragraph will be seen as overheated.
Actually a substantial amount of Musk’s ‘wealth’is now from the equally absurd market valuation of SpaceX at US$350B, and since Elon has made it clear that he intends to make SpaceX the exclusive provider of all space launch services to the Department of Defense, NASA, NOAA, and anyone else who wants a ride on a US launcher, there is minimal incentive by ‘the powers that be’ to question that figure.
Billionaire: Sorry, no room in this lifeboat!
Drowning Man: Your ‘lifeboat’ is a 300 foot yacht with an 25 meter pool, two helipads, and a smaller hydrofoil yacht that detaches and serves as the captain’s gig!
Billionaire: Definitely no room here!
Drowning Man: There is only you, your 25-year-old trophy girlfriend, and 12 crew.
Billionaire: Need keep the bunkrooms open in case Larry Ellison and his friends drop by.
Drowning Man: Larry Ellison has his own 300 foot yacht, and an entire Hawaiian island!
Billionaire: Gotta go, the ice in my Mai Tai is melting. Good luck with the swimming.
Drowning Man: Can you at least toss me a lifejacket?
Billionaire: How fast can you transfer 100 bitcoin to my account?
We are a Republic. We are also a Democracy. They’re not mutually exclusive.
Republic is an “entity of the people”. A Democracy is where “the people rule”. We have attributes of both in our government structure.
We are certainly imperfect in both of those. And we’ve had some backsliding in recent decades. We have our problems. We have things we need to fix, and God knows it will not be easy. But we are both a Democracy and a Republic.
Your position is that the definition of “republic” is “the lack of a single monarch”?
You’re quite sure on that? You don’t think that I can come up with any alternate arrangements than the two possibilities of “with a monarch” and “without a monarch”? You don’t think I can find definitions in official sources like dictionaries that say otherwise?
Can you find a dictionary (not written by you) that gives your definition?
Technically no, which is why those in the UK in favor of officially abolishing the monarchy are called “Republicans”, not to be confused with the American political party.
ETA: of course one can raise an eyebrow at the vast gulf between theory and reality, such as the UK parliament pretending that it is merely handling the government of the kingdom for the monarch, who graciously assents to their decisions. Versus the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, where the elections always return a 100% vote for the current Kim, now in the third generation of leadership.
It also must lack a theocratic government. Republics are states belonging to the people at large. Their precise manner of governance could be any one of a zillion methods. The USA and France are both republics, but aren’t run the same way. The USA’s system is in most ways closer to Canada’s than France’s, but Canada is not a republic.
You can have setups where, say, a group of selected officials vote for some law, at which point it goes to a vote by the people, directly (or vice versa). I can’t think of any case, at the Federal level, where we have any process like that. Some states have some elements.
Now if I shave an orange dog, I end up with fur not peel. A Democratic Republic is a Republic. Adjectives aren’t nouns. They’re not the “thing” of the sentence.
When the Constitution was written, landowning males were the only people allowed to vote for representatives. Jefferson touted this as a clear and obvious “democratic” republic.
The representatives were told to consider themselves the representatives of the people. Their focus and attention was towards the welfare of everyone. That mental image and compact was the “democratic” element.
And that is not a democracy. Is a philosophical goal, and there just the one that Thomas Jefferson - the guy who cheered for the French genocide, kept a 14 year old black girl as his forced love slave, and calculated to run his farm to achieve 4% growth in slave headcount through birth so that he had compounding interest on slave sales - happened to like the most.
Jefferson is not the best person to have leading your whimsies.