Republic v. Democracy

The Constitution says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” What exactly does that mean? The word republic describes a form of government, but it is not a very precise definition.

A republic isn’t a hereditary monarchy. A republic doesn’t allow the same family to rule for generation after generation. A republic chooses its rulers and leaders . . . some other way. But that’s really all it means.

When the founders wrote the Constitution, republican government was innovative. But republics are common in the world today. Most of the countries in the world are republics. According to Wikipedia, there are seven absolute monarchies, 37 constitutional monarchies, and a couple of nations that currently have no effective government at all. All the rest are republics. North Korea and Iran and other “evil empires” are counted among the republics, while the non-republics include economic powerhouses (e.g., Japan) and countries with superior quality of life (e.g., Norway). Wikipedia is subject to biased editing, so it’s wise to refer to the more authoritative profiles offered by the CIA. The CIA says North Korea is a dictatorship. But it agrees that most countries in the world, including some failed states, are republics.

Being a republic is no guarantee of good government, or efficient government, or government that ensures fair treatment for all or the greatest good for the greatest number of people. There are bad republics and good ones. There are good non-republics and bad ones.

Separate from America’s embrace of the “republic” label is an appreciation for “democracy.” Theodore Roosevelt, in a major speech in 1912 advocated for what he called “pure democracy”:

 I believe in pure democracy. With Lincoln, I hold that “this country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it.”

It is often said that ours is a government of checks and balances. But this should only mean that these checks and balances obtain as among the several different kinds of representatives of the people — judicial, executive, and legislative to whom the people have delegated certain portions of their power. It does not mean that the people have parted with their power or cannot resume it. The “division of powers” is merely the division among the representatives of the powers delegated to them; the term must not be held to mean that the people have divided their power with their delegates. The power is the people’s, and only the people’s.

The other Roosevelt, Franklin D.,  peppered the word democracy throughout his 1941 State of the Union address, which is famously remembered as the “Four Freedoms” Speech:

I suppose that every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world–assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace.

During sixteen long months this assault has blotted out the whole pattern of democratic life in an appalling number of independent nations, great and small. And the assailants are still on the march, threatening other nations, great and small.

Therefore, as your President, performing my constitutional duty to “give to the Congress information of the state of the Union,” I find it, unhappily, necessary to report that the future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders.

Armed defense of democratic existence is now being gallantly waged in four continents. If that defense fails, all the population and all the resources of Europe, and Asia, and Africa and Australasia will be dominated by conquerors.

 The evidence so far suggests that the two words – republic and democracy – are equally respectable and equally useful for describing America’s system. But in recent years people have begun to deprecate democracy. 

Here’s a contemporary evangelical Christian named Robert Breaker with a whiteboard and a black marker. He says that republic is good and democracy is bad. He has two sources for these insights. They are Plato’s The Republic and something by conservative fire-breather Ann Coulter.

Breaker insists that in a republic there is rule of law, and that is good. He doesn’t say where the laws come from. But he writes “Republic” at the top of a column and then writes good things beneath it. Then he writes “Democracy” at the top of another column and writes bad things under it. Persuasive!

This longer and more elaborate video makes the same argument. Democracy is bad and republic is good:

Both these videos insist that democracy means direct rule by the total population, and can only mean that. Obviously this kind of democracy is impossible except on the smallest scale. Direct democracy happens when residents of a small town gather in the local school auditorium and vote on simple and non-technical issues. But for any community larger than a few hundred residents, direct democracy isn’t logistically possible. And everybody knows it.

The republican bedrock principle of “rule of law” is just as much an impossibility as a true democracy, though. Both videos insist that in a republic, “rule of law” takes the possibility of mischief out of the hands of evil men. But no nation, today or ever in history, began with its laws already in place, clear and complete enough to decide all issues. Rule of law cannot procure perfect justice so long as imperfect men make the laws.

God gave Moses the laws that ruled ancient Israel. But the 10 Commandments metastasized over time into a massive and evolving Talmud. There will always be need to add new laws and refine the old ones, or at least to interpret how to apply old laws to new situations. And those decisions are made by a privileged few. The republican form of government doesn’t change that.

The founding fathers, including some authors of the Constitution, didn’t like direct democracy. George Washington was high-born, and he probably never doubted that he was more qualified than other men to run the show.

Not everyone was as noble as Washington. But everybody could read the news from France, and in those years America was developing its system of government, the French Revolution was providing a bad example of what actual mob rule can lead to. Democracy was the word Madison and others used to describe France’s desperate and decadent government.

But a favorable opinion of government by and for the people developed early. Historian Jill Lapore writes that the first states to join the nation after the original 13, including Kentucky and Tennessee, adopted relaxed voting laws. Ordinary citizens had the power to vote, and they chose candidates who respected ordinary men. The movement reached its apex in 1828 with the election of Andrew Jackson.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, democracy came to be celebrated: the right of the majority to govern became dogmatic; and the right to vote was extended to all white men, developments much derided by conservatives who warned that the rule of numbers would destroy the Republic. By the 1830s, the American experiment had produced the first large-scale popular democracy in the history of the world. [These Truths, 2018, p.191]

Proponents of democracy in America, including both Roosevelts, were not deluded. They did not espouse something impossible or something that would inevitably lead (as Robert Breaker disingenuously claims) to tyrants, tyranny, Hitler, and Satan. When the Roosevelts said democracy, they were talking about a government that works for the people and earns the people’s approval.

Critics say that democracy is always oppressive to minorities. But it doesn’t have to be. If the majority chooses to treat a powerless minority in a kindly way, then under majority rule powerless minorities can thrive. Children cannot vote, yet America’s majority builds and operates schools and playgrounds for the children’s benefit. America has spent large sums to help disabled people participate more fully in society though the disabled, too, are a minority. Racial minorities have never been treated fairly in America, but democracy is not to blame for that. Racist white people are.

Critics also say democracy tends toward sudden. passionate, and ill-informed action. But that doesn’t follow either. The US has entered more wars against the wishes of the people than with them. There is as much danger of foreign entanglement from a professional political-military-industrial class as from popular demand. Think how often America has sent troops and military assets to places the people had never heard of.

The tension between republic and democracy is silly. Both concepts are essential to America. Both describe good aspects of America. Republic is best understood as describing a form of government, but not a very specific one. Almost any country that doesn’t have a hereditary monarch can call itself a republic.

Democracy, on the other hand, is best thought of as a principle or objective. A country or a government is democratic if it tries to involve the people, or if it tries to do what the people want. America doesn’t want an actual direct democracy. But we do want government that works for the good of the mass of the people (and equally for every individual within that mass).