That’s what makes this prime Internet trolling material: Whatever definition you pick, regardless of how carefully you choose, I can always find a respectable source saying you’re wrong. That’s it. That’s the whole gag.
An honest discussion of what the word means ends with people agreeing it has multiple meanings, all in active use, and then arbitrarily picking one to make the actual debate go more smoothly. A dishonest one involves someone holding firm to a definition that’s less useful in the current context and stating that anyone who wants a reasonable definition is illiterate.
The people under discussion, the ones who rant and rave about the difference between a democracy and a republic, are the dishonest ones, or at least idiots who have been duped by the dishonest ones.
Democracy is not about being the best possible government. It’s about having a way to peacefully stop a bad government. It’s all about taking the revolution out of government. That’s the point. Wars are not only economically damaging, but damaging to ones life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. It’s in the best interest of everyone to try and prevent one for as long as possible. Even the economy itself is better if there are no wars, since you aren’t secure in your property when people are trying to kill you. and you can’t sell to dead people. Sure, you can sell war supplies, but that’s going to be someone else, not the people who are currently well off. (and you can still sell that stuff during peace time)
And democracy does fight for the minority, oddly enough. First off, democracy gets its legitimacy from those who are governed, and becomes stronger the more equal people are. It’s in the government’s own interest for everyone to be equal. Furthermore, a lot of people, despite being in the majority, are capable of realizing that they could be a minority. And minorities are capable of joining together and punching way above their weight. They can push the threat of a revolution (which weakens democracy) in order to get what they want.
This isn’t perfect, of course. Revolutions do still happen. Slavery, for example, was not ended by democracy but by war. But notice that the Confederate government lacked legitimacy since it was founded on people not being equal. When pitted against a more legitimate government, it failed.
This is of course, a simplistic overview. It’s a lot more complicated than this. But the idea that the majority will always trump a minority in democracy is an even simpler and less correct view. There is no inherent tyranny of the majority.
It’s all about moving the revolutions into government, where they can be fought using ballots instead of bullets. The very existence of a working democratic polity takes the wind out of any would-be revolutionary’s sails because it’s cheaper and easier to petition for change within the system than to try and instigate violent change outside of it.
That’s one reason the Civil War happened when it did: In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the Presidency fair and square (by mid-1800s standards) without even being on the ballots in nine states*, all of which would try to secede and fail. Also, look at the election results: In most of the states that would remain in the Union, the contest was between Lincoln and Douglas; in the soon-to-be Confederate states, it was largely Bell versus Breckinridge. Lincoln still won almost 60% of the electoral votes nationally, a solid majority, and the Slave Power states saw that they no longer had the population to veto a president they found entirely unfit. And the war came.
*(I’d say ten states, but South Carolina didn’t have a popular vote for the President yet so they didn’t have ballots, per se. Still: South fucking Carolina. Do you think he’d have been on the ballot?)
As a British person of fairly advanced age, I do not think I have ever heard the UK described as a republic before reading this thread. We consider it to be a democracy (because the lion’s share of political power resides with the elected House of Commons) but not a republic. In the context of British politics, a republican is someone who wants to abolish the institution of the monarchy and replace it with an elected president as head of state.
So no,unlike the united States, Britain is not a republic, and it certainly does not claim to be. Neither, in fact, are many of the countries that score highest on the Democracy Index: not Britain, so much, but Canada and Australia (who share Britain’s Queen), and the scandinavian countries, who have kings of their own. Of course teh role of monarch in all these countries is almost entirely ceremonial, but this is the case too for electe presidents in many democratic republics: Israle for instance, or Ireland.
And IME some of the same people are likely to call liberals “useful idiots” of the Marxists or whoever (and to misattribute the phrase “useful idiot” to Lenin).
No, because it is still a useless comparison. Just because you can correlate two qualitatively different things because of single point of comparison doesn’t mean squat. Yes, the US and Saudi Arabia are similar in one respect. That doesn’t mean we have to redefine terms so the US is more like countries we like and less like ones we don’t.
There are elections in lots of dictatorships. That doesn’t mean that a bogus election in, say, Cuba, somehow negates the fact that we have elections that are better than theirs.
Count me in with those who say that republic can mean a few different things based on context, but because those definitions are not prescriptive. It isn’t like anything actually changes in the US if some call it a republic and others call it a democracy, no more than my golf handicap were to go down if I started calling it a game rather than a sport.
This is an extremely US-centric view. Slavery was ended throughout the British Empire by a combination of court cases, local legislation (eg - Upper Canada’s abolition of slavery in 1791) and a series of measures passed by the British Parliament for the Empire as a whole.
I actually started noticing it during the 2000 presidential election. When some people started arguing that our efforts ought to be focused on ensuring that everyone who cast a vote actually got their votes counted, one of the retorts was “This is a republic, not a democracy!”
I don’t really understand the logical connection, but it seems to imply something to the effect of — “Only in a democracy do we care whether everyone’s vote counts, because in a republic, policy is set by elected representatives of the people, so it doesn’t matter what each individual citizen wants.”
It’s baffling because having our form of republican government really and truly isn’t an excuse for electoral fraud. (I say ‘our form’ as opposed to a Dictatorial Republic, like North Korea or Belarus. If you’re willing to call the UK a crowned republic, then that form of republic isn’t an excuse for fraud, either.)
It was gloating based on completely misunderstanding a particularly idiotic semantic game. There’s multiple layers of stupidity there.