So, I like to read crazy right-wing message boards in my spare time. Something I’m seeing cropping up more and more is a very angsty cry (I’m not going to link, but :
“That is why we have a republic and not a democracy. That is what they need to do to save the republic. THIS IS A REPUBLIC NOT A DEMOCRACY.”
Along with talk about how democracy = socialism.
Soooo, is this just a matter of people thinking that Democrat = democracy and Republican = republic? When I was a youngun’, it was only pedants who made that correction in casual conversation. A “democracy” was a good thing and the word wasn’t partisan (at least in the US). Is this changing?
They’re saying the voters got the election wrong, so we should ignore them. And the basis of that argument is whiny pedantry. The U.S. is not a direct democracy, but it’s a democratic republic.
The U.S. is a republic AND a democracy. That is, the U.S. is a democratic republic. As opposed to, say, an aristocratic republic, like the Roman Republic or the Venetian Republic, with their constitutions designed to leave most power with their hereditary nobilities. The Southern planter-elite used to run their states as aristocratic republics and seemed to think the whole country should be one, but I should hope the Civil War put an end to that kind of thinking on these shores.
In my experience, anyone who insists “America is a republic, not a democracy!” is not arguing but whining. Usually, what they actually mean by it is, “America is a federal republic, not a unitary republic”; which is a completely different matter.
A direct democracy is, more or less, the Athenian model: everything that the state wants to do, the voting polity votes on. It is… not entirely practical for a modern state.
A democratic republic is what we have: the citizens are the source of power, but delegate that power to elected representatives who do the work of the state.
The word “republic,” by the way, doesn’t mean a lot by itself so far as I know. Etymologically from the Latin res publica, or public thing. Just means a state of some sort–could be any sort, really, without some modifier. Thus part of why the “republican form of government” clause in the constitution is so difficult to interpret.
We discussed this not that long ago. I observed that, after years of hearing this apparently pointless little factlet, it occurred to me that I’ve only heard it from Republicans, never from Democrats. (I gave cites). Was it possible that this was just as petty as “We’re Republicans, so we want it to be called a Republic. It’s not a Democracy, full of Democrats”? It sure as heck seems to be. Arguing with people making this distinction seems pretty pointless.
The Republic was a squabbling gridlock of dilatory and corrupt bureaucrats. Our Imperial Democracy vests the will of the people directly and absolutely in their chosen leader, His Majesty the Emperor Palpatine.
The argument seems to be that electing Obama was a form of mob rule, that tramples the rights of Real Americans, who now appear to be in the minority. These Real Americans were the ones that the founders had in mind for government when they created the constitution, which now is being shredded by the mob.
Basically they are misusing the term Republic to represent constitutionally limited government.
That’s a real pain, what with that electing an Officer of the Day stuff, especially since all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified by a 2/3 majority in the case of purely internal affairs… or however it goes.
I have clear memories of myself as a wee one listening to my mother say that Thomas Jefferson envisioned a Republic, where only the landowners could vote, and how we’d have a much better country then. Even as a kid, I thought she was just trying to “keep those pesky negroes down”.
I have heard it both from the internet semi-far-right AND semi-far-left. I get the distinction that one or the other is lamenting the fact, or else celebrating it. Not sure which.
My simple distinction:
Republic have elected heads of government. Not handed down from father to son, or selected by the aristocrats.
Democracy is harder to define, but involves an electoral, free, government. But you can have righties/lefties whine that we’re not really a democracy as long as abortion is legal/homelessness exists.
So the UK is a democracy, but not a republic. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A non-democratic republic is definable, but most political nutjobs define it as “an okay government that I hate for some biased reason.”
No, more like a syndicational-anarchist commune. Splitters.
Well, I don’t know about that, but Jefferson did envision a republic where practically everybody (white and male) would be a landowner, and a yoeman/family farmer with no landlord; except for a small minority of craftsmen, artisans, merchants and professionals. (And the blacks would have been freed and sent back to Africa, or somewhere. For fear of racial contamination, and because they just couldn’t live as free equals in the same society as superior whites. But whites would intermarry freely with Indians and form an amalgamated race.) It seemed like common sense at the time that society had to be mostly made up of farmers, so let them be yeomen rather than peasants.
A republic is a government where most of the lawmaking ability lies with a large body of officials, frequently called a Senate, a House, or an Assembly, who are all more or less equal in power, who decide what to do more or less by majority rule. Rome (before the emperors) was a republic, in the sense that there was such a body and it did make the laws. However, the public at large had no say in what the laws would be, no recourse at all if they disagreed with the will of the Senate, and no hope of getting into the Senate. Senatorial status was largely hereditary, and there were strict rules about who could be in it. That’s an aristocratic republic, where the members of the ruling body are selected because of their heritage. Or maybe compare China, which is basically an bureaucratic republic; their elections are fairly meaningless, and you advance in government by knowing people, working at lower levels, and being selected for advancement by your superiors. In America, we have a democratic republic; our Senators and Representatives are selected by the direct majority vote of the public. We’re actually a good deal more democratic now than we were at the Founding; Senators used to be selected by state legislatures.
It’s just another way of asserting the tired, anachronistic states’-rights argument, as if the Civil War had never happened. Its history as a cover story is not a respectable one.
According to the House of Representatives, and the “American’s Creed,” we are a “Democracy in a republic.” Whatever that means.
But, yeah, this has been a right-wing talking point since the Vietnam War. When large numbers of people were opposed to the war, war-Hawks pointed out that the will of the people isn’t how these decisions are made.
(Mind you, when the courts overruled California’s Prop 187, which denied benefits to illegal immigrants, the same right-wingers yelled like hell, saying that the “Will of the People” had been ignored. So they only care about democracy when it favors their ideology…)