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08/30/2003 Entry: "Democracy, republic, or what?"

Can anyone explain to me (in the simplest possible terms, please!) why it is that I keep reading commentators who say, "The United States is not a democracy, it is a republic." And, while we're at it can anyone let me know when this change in thinking happened? I was brought up on talk of America being "the greatest democracy in the world" and I am genuinely puzzled by those who want to disassociate themselves from the title.Can't a country be both a democracy and a republic? If a republic is "a state in which supreme power is hel by the people or their elected representatives ... not by a monarch etc" and a democracy is "a system of government by the whole population usually through elected representatives", how are these two incompatible? What is the issue that's at stake?

Posted by Richard @ 09/01/2003 07:20 AM CST

Richard, I'm not sure how familiar you are with the original setup of our government.

A pure democracy, in the Greek sense, would be a government where the population elected most or all of their rulers by majority vote.

We never have had that, and throughout their writings our founding fathers deplored the idea. "Tyranny of the majority" was something to be avoided at all costs.

So we have on the federal level a three-part government. The Supreme Court is not elected by a vote AT ALL. The President is not elected by a straight popular vote, but by the electoral college which spreads out the voting power a bit, giving a bit more say in the vote to less populated states. If it were a straight popular vote, the power to elect the President would be concentrated in the major population centers, mostly on the coastal areas.

As for the Congress, we have the House of Representatives and the Senate. We do elect both Representatives and Senators directly by popular vote. However, originally we did NOT elect Senators by popular vote, but instead they were elected by state legislatures. So the original idea for electing senators was more republican (balance of powers) and less democratic.

Probably the reason why you hear people say we are NOT a democracy is because of the anti-democratic trend throughout Western thought. For the Greeks, democracy was just as tyrannical as autocracy. For the Americans who wrote the Constitution, like I said, democracy was practically the same thing as mob-ocracy.Also, note that originally the only people who could vote in most cases were white male property owners. Universal suffrage has radically changed the concept of democracy.

I suppose you can say that we have a democratic republic. Although our system is now top-down, the Federal government rules what it wants. It did not used to be that way. The States and local communities had much more power.

Don't worry about figuring out the electoral college. I can't figure out why you guys still have a symbolic monarchy.

Posted by Josh @ 09/01/2003 01:54 AM CST