1. With the "America is a republic not a democracy" crowd in full voice these days, I figured I'd share this piece I wrote back in 2012 on the meaning of the word "democracy" in the late 18th century. medium.com/@sethcotlar/ye…
2. Here are some of the key takeaways. Significant numbers of people began calling the American political system a "democracy" (with a positive connotation) in the early & mid 1790s.
3. Most (if not all) of the men who wrote the Constitution in 1787 differentiated between a republic and a democracy, and they indeed saw a republic as preferable.
4. That said, there were plenty of folks in that founding era who argued that the new republic should be more, not less, democratic. Republics and democracies, in other words, were not seen as opposites...rather, republics could be put on a spectrum of more or less democratic.
5. Most of the folks who used the word "democracy" with a positive connotation in the 1780s and 1790s saw it as the opposite of "aristocracy," a term that had both political and economic meaning.
6. "Aristocracy" was associated with hereditary forms of socio-political power, forms of power that continued to exist in America, these democrats insisted, even though the nation had no formal aristocracy like Britain.
7. The first concerted effort to push back against the idea that America is a democracy occurred in the mid-1790s and gathered steam in the late 1790s as tensions with France ramped up.
8. These criticisms of "American democracy" were put forward by the same Federalists who passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, and who were appalled at the rise of the "self-created" political societies across the nation comprised of ordinary citizens.
9. The most strident anti-democrats were unabashed elitists, immigration restrictionists (in this case anti-Irish immigrants), and also, coincidentally enough, the first people to introduce the Illuminati conspiracy into American political culture.
10. A revised version of this appears in this book, which contains several other essays on the topic (though pertaining to different places and eras). global.oup.com/academic/produ…
11. Shameless plug...but I also have much more to say about the 1790s battles over whether America should be more or less democratic in this book. amazon.com/Tom-Paines-Ame…
