Thread by @SpockResists

People arguing that America wasn’t set up as a democracy 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️
These people do not read. They do not know about history. ‘America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy’ Is a Dangerous—And Wrong—Argument. A Constitutional Republic is the argument today. I am astounded by the idiocy.

Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it.

The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule.

The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called “pure” democracy and defended the American experiment as “wholly republican.” To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic,

was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified.

When founding thinkers such as James Madison spoke of democracy, they were usually referring to direct democracy, what Madison frequently labeled “pure” democracy.

To those who are trending this “constitutional republic” nonsense today are beyond clueless and obviously do not know the difference between a direct democracy and a representative democracy. What people are calling a “constitutional republic” is actually the

representative democracy we have to today as clearly described by James Madison in Federlist No. 14. What this generation considered either a democracy or a republic is troublesome to us insofar as it largely granted only white men the full rights of citizens, albeit with some

exceptions. The history of democracy as grasped by the Founders, drawn largely from the ancient world, revealed that overbearing majorities could all too easily lend themselves to mob rule, dominating minorities and trampling individual rights.

Madison nevertheless sought to defend popular government, the rule of the many, rather than retreat to the rule of the few.

American constitutional design can best be understood as an effort to establish a sober form of democracy. It did so by embracing representation, the

separation of powers, checks and balances, and the protection of individual rights—all concepts that were unknown in the ancient world where democracy had earned its poor reputation.

The founders did not want a direct democracy, a pure rule of the people, they wanted a democracy where the people ruled through representatives. Alexander Hamilton made the case for popular government and even called it democracy: “A representative democracy, where the right

of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.

The American experiment, as advanced by Hamilton and Madison, sought to redeem the cause of popular government against its checkered history. Given the success of the experiment by the standards of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, we would come to use the term democracy

as a stand-in for representative democracy, as distinct from direct democracy.

Consider that President Abraham Lincoln, facing a civil war, which he termed the great test of popular government, used constitutional republic and democracy synonymously, eloquently casting the

American experiment as government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
And whatever the complexities of American constitutional design, Lincoln insisted, “the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible.”

Indeed, Lincoln offered a definition of popular government that can guide our understanding of a democracy, or a republic today: “A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and

sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.”

High-minded claims that we are not a democracy surreptitiously fuse republic with minority rule rather than popular government. Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our

constitutional design, but a perversion of it.

Routine minority rule is neither desirable nor sustainable, and makes it difficult to characterize the country as either a democracy or a republic. We should see this as a constitutional failure demanding constitutional reform.

I also have no intention of replying to those loonylala freakazoids who will stick to their comforting untruths because of their cognitive dissonance.