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Originally Posted by SanDiegoSteve
Uh, no it's not. This is just one of many articles on the subject. This is just a small part of one:
From David N. Mayer
A Republic, Not a Democracy
218 years ago, on May 25, 1787, the framers of the Constitution of the United States began meeting at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The debates were secret – a deliberate decision of the delegates, designed to keep them free from outside pressures. When the long, hot Philadelphia summer came to an end in mid-September, as the delegates were wrapping up their work and about to reveal to the public their proposed Constitution, it was said that someone asked the oldest delegate, Benjamin Franklin, what kind of government the nation would have. Franklin’s response has become famous, an important part of U.S. historical lore: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Franklin’s comment came to my mind last month, when I read about President Bush’s trip to eastern Europe. Bush spoke glowingly of the progress of “democracy” in many of the nations formerly under Soviet Russian tyranny. Yet, like other American presidents in the modern era – and indeed, like most commentators on political or cultural matters – he erroneously described the American system of government as a “democracy,” or the United States as a nation based on “democratic” principles. It’s a common error, but one that shows how far out of touch most modern Americans are with the principles of their nation’s founding.
The United States of America is not a democracy. Let me emphasize that – THE UNITED STATES IS NOT A DEMOCRACY – and add, “Thank God!” America’s Founders understood well the evils of democracy and deliberated created a system of government that was not democratic but rather republican. The form of government in the United States (both the national government and the government of each of the 50 states) is not a democracy but a republic. Indeed, it is most accurately described as a “limited-government constitutional republic.”
The difference is not merely semantic. The word “republic” comes from the Latin phrase res publica, which means, literally, “the public thing(s).” It generally refers to a representative form of government, one in which the people’s representatives (chosen either directly or indirectly by them) govern but not the people themselves. (Such was the form of government, in theory at least, of the ancient Roman republic.) “Democracy,” on the other hand, is derived from the Greek words demos and kratein, which when combined mean, loosely, “the people rule.” Democracy thus is synonymous with direct rule by the people, or more accurately, by a majority of the people.
James Madison explained the difference between a democracy and a republic in two of the essays he wrote for The Federalist Papers. In No. 14, he distinguished the two this way: “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents,” he wrote. “A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.” In No. 39, while seeking to determine “the distinctive characters of the republican form,” Madison wrote that the term has been misapplied by many political writers.
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