Thanks, to both, for the elaboration.
Oh, while I don’t think this was ever spelled out in my lessons, I thought this might interest you: a hypothesis I just got out of my left elbow has to do with the situation during the Cortes de Cádiz.
Picture this: you have a bunch of people who think that France is the end-all-be-all of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity except for that pesky “let’s invade the neighbors” thing they’re doing, and the ones who are expected to hopefully be able to break the siege are the “English”. So these people who despised our traditional unicameral Parliamentary structures* wanted to have Liberté, Equalité and Fraternité, but what they copied was the British system because at the time they were un peu tired of the French outside the gates.
- different realms within Spain had different systems, some of them still theoretically in place at the time, others extinct, but all of them were single-chamber.
It sounds weird to most Americans too. As I said, it’s really only advocated by the right wing and it only really started during the 2000 presidential election recount. It seems to be connected directly to a desire to normalize the idea that a dominant political group can legitimately marginalize the voting power of its opponents by monkeying with the electoral system.
The first time I saw it was in 1996-7 or so at a Kent Hovind anti-evolution lecture at my Uni (long story – suffice it to say that I attended for reasons other than agreeing with the man). One of the slides was a list of “evolution values” and “christian values”. “Democracy” was an evolution value. “The Republic” was a christian value.
I immediately pegged it as “he’s trying to say ‘vote republican’ without losing his tax exempt status by explicitly endorsing a political party” (and didn’t update his slides to account for his schpiel being given in Canada).
So there were definitely undercurrents of the idea prior to 2000.
I can’t remember seeing a thread with such a great quality-of-post/total-posts ratio (now lowered by this one).
Plus fireworks from Carl Pham and Exapno.
Thanks to all.
Let me ask, as a drift, since it came up: in my studies in historiography, the term “the Whig view (or theory, idea, whatever) of history” was cited not, as here, as the background to a specific political or social proposition, but as something endemic to Western thought in general, and which can be seen at work in all histories: events occur “towards” some better goal, a secular faith system.
The other two expressions of this, far more powerful of course, was a misunderstood Darwinism and Marxism. (Every time you hear “the wrong side of history” it is not necessarily spoken by an adherent of either consciously, but reveals the human need the idea fills, foreign to events as it is.)
Can anyone cite or quote some juicy bits where that is spelled out? I last checked thirty years ago in grad school…
Cx:
I’m sure it goes back even further. It didn’t just appear out of nowhere. But the recount seems to be when.it sort of came out into public conversation.
Robby here just pointed me to a wikipedia page on representative democracy that calls the United Kingdom a crowned republic. Cute.
ETA: Et voilà. From the discussion page:
“It seems that “Representative Democracy” is a fabrication to get the word “democracy” into the description of the USofA government! There’s even a comment about a “supreme court” and “interpreting the constitution” which have nothing to do with actually describing democracy. The USofA is a Constitutional Republic, attempting to invent classifications to include the word “democracy” to meet some political objective is a disservice to wikipedia.”
…and
“From what I read from both articles, a representative democracy and a republic appear to be one in the same, which would mean they belong in the same article (one redirects to the other). There must be some differences between the two, otherwise there would not be two different articles about it.”
Rebuttals to these statements follow, much like this thread.
This is the first time I’ve seen citations from Wikipedia discussion threads. I mean, not even the actual article …
Ha. I wasn’t supporting any position or otherwise. Not really ‘citing’. Merely sharing similar discussions with similar viewpoints from other places, for whoever is interested.
Yes, there are people who take the position that the U.S. shouldn’t be called a democracy. We’ve acknowledged that repeatedly. We’ve also noted that it is a peculiar fringe ideological opinion with no basis in fact, history, or philiology. So why should an opinion by someone pushing this view be treated as anything more than the usual ignorance found everywhere on the Internet?