Among the many strange political arguments I have heard and sometimes responded to, is one that begins like this:
We are a Republic, not a Democracy!
I never quite got the point of this when I heard it on talk radio shows or saw it in online forums. Is it to imply we have no right to vote? Is it a semantics game based on literal meanings? Sometimes it's pointed out the Founders didn't want a democracy, which is true in one definition, but doesn't resemble their Constitution or our current reality. Some say we don't have a democracy because the word isn’t in the Constitution, but republican is.
Republic - From the Latin Res Publica, meaning public matter.
Democracy - From the Greek Demokratia, meaning popular government.
A Republic is a government without a monarch, the executive power usually residing with a president. It is also a government with input from the governed through representatives.
Madison, writing in Federalist number 10, and through no fault of his own, sets up this confusion that causes those predisposed to it to misinterpret his meaning. His theme concerns factions, and how best to control majority urges that would usurp the rights of the minority.
From The Federalist 10: “From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction."
And:
"A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union.
The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.”
Madison describes the difference between democracy and republic as being the same as that between pure democracy and representative democracy. In this, a representative democratic republic is a tautology. The Constitution, which describes that type of government, is the contract which prevents the whims of the majority from diminishing the rights of the minority.
The Constitution did begin by limiting direct elections of Federal government representatives to voting for members of the House. Senators were chosen by state legislatures that also determined their methods for nominating electors to decide who became president – additional filters between The People and office holders that do not qualify as being undemocratic.
However, our Founders did leave us a Constitution that can be amended.
The 17th amendment gave us the right to vote for Senators. While the states determine how they choose presidential electors that is also now decided by popular vote.
Besides the original article 1, section 2 right to vote for House Representatives, and the 17th amendment mentioned above, democracy is expressed several times in these other amendments concerning voting rights: 14th -sec 2, 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th.
We vote.
We are a Federal Republic and a Constitutional Representative Democracy.
Lincoln had it right. We are a government of the people (res publica), by the people (demokratia).
It is only by our patriotic due diligence that we can be a government for the people.
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Ted Frier
The Flylooper
Ben Sen
mishima666
Paul Nevins
Ron Robinson
Salon.com
Comments
I would argue, as have others, although people like Dahl in the profession disagree on this point, that the the real significance of the distinction between Democracy and Republic comes from non-democratic, or to be precise, non-majoritarian bounds on the will of the Demos in the American Republic, in contradistinction to Athens, which pushed majoritarianism much further as a decision making rule.
In Athens, one could vote on essentially anything, except the generals, sort there I digress, but essentially, a pure democracy. The representative part is not the whole story in the difference between a Democracy and a Republic.
In a very general sense, the Condorcet Paradox and Arrow's Theorem, and if you get reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal gory the McKelvey-Plott-Cohen (got a plug in there for you Linda, thank you for teaching me well) and the work of Austin-Smith Banks Postitive Political Theory, demonstrate that it is a necessity for dynamic political stability that there exists a subset of voters less than a majority, known as the Collegium in the literature, but really just back to Aristotle's notion of the Few, that has a veto, especially in Federalist 10 over the property order (Madison by the way precedes Marx in terms of class conflict, but like Harry Eckstein said, it is really all Artistotle) in order to avoid having the political system cycle irrationally. By cycling is meant A>B>C>A>B>C>A>B>C..... where > means chosen by the voting rule which we assume means public preference, i.e. presumably the public good: res publica.
Cycling irrationally is what Madison meant when he said "Hemlock one day and a statue the next."
It is not necessary to have the Demos be dumb, or, more importantly to the point you address, it is not necessary that their representatives be dumb.
All that is necessary for irrationality is to use pure majority rule for all decisions, which is how a lot of people define democracy and this talk of electing the President directly might have a lot of unintended consequence,s and I would personally repeal the Seventeenth Amendment and come up with a plan that by qualifications produced an American aristocracy of merit, and then the political decision making process will not serve the Res Publica, because it will be intransitive (the A>B>C>A>B>C.... result is intransitivity) in character, or through dynamic instability function so poorly/intransitviely that it necessitates a dictator/singelton set to restore order, which was also Machiavelli's argument for cycles in the Discourses.
It seems to me the real issue is, how do you cycle the aristocratic element that exists, of natural necessity, in any society, per Pareto's point, so that you don't have the same old same old for so long that the "elite" are like in-bred poodles who collapse everything one day. But like DeTocqueville argued, it may be the case that the lack of a heriditary aristocracy may have weakened the aristocratic element in the American Constitution fatally from the beginning.
I personally would set the bar high in the Senate. Military service, and advanced non-professional degree, preferably history or economics or political science as on of them, but based of a Great Books Curriculum, and private sector experience, and then you would get people with the right range of experience, instead of just good talkers as was always assumed the case in the House. But rated.
Thanks for dropping in and offering an expansion of the issue. I am aware of theories against democracy, and less populist interpretations, such as Schumpeter's. I ran across his while reviewing the theories.
Here, however, I'm concentrating on Madison, and #10, and his interpretation. I notice Hobbes and Plato and Madson's objections sound familiar to each other, but I limited the information to the specific subject at hand. In Madison's words, republic and representative democracy are one and the same. So, relevant to our democratic republic - other theories being interesting, but not the same as what we do have.
Thanks for the comment, informative as always.
It reminds me of how the right is forever saying things like "... but , but , but the New Deal didn't end the Depression, WWII did" OK- so WHAT? WWII =New Deal X 10. You have just admitted that massive government spending got the country out of the depression. Thank you for playing.
The Rwingers like this argument because it makes them sound smart, and I think also because they can get into the thought of authortarianism.
al,
You are wrong. We vote with some expectation of having them counted. That means we are a democracy, despite your grumblings about oligarchy and what you consider legitimate democracy. You don't get to make the rules.
However, point taken on oligarchy, and I must mention, an oligarchy we keep voting for.
""and that is what democracy means: rule by the people. (from the greek "demos kratia", which you mistranslated.)""
Lincoln had it right. We are a government of the people (res publica), by the people (dimokratia).
Dimokratia, meaning popular government. (guess what popular means...)
From Middle French democratie (French démocratie)
to continue:
From Middle French democratie (French démocratie)
The translation of democracy to Greek is dimokratia.
Piddlin' point anyway........
Thanks for stopping by to offer al's definition of democracy.
True, the Republic can take as popular input a wide scope, or narrow. Though Madison uses it and representative democracy as the same, it is different - Republic being implicit to some form of popular input, democracy more explicit. Democracy assumes some level of political egalitarianism and liberty. Of course anything dishonest in its application can be said to be invalid.
To our situation, Madison's definition is important because it defines our social contract, Fed 10 among those having been cited as valid Constitutional referrences.
Thanks for the comment.