How To be a Pedantic Git Part 1

OK online debate warriors today we will discuss the one of the most tired and almost always useless observation that the US Government is not a Democracy; it's a Republic.

Yes, it is true that the United States government is not a direct democracy. But it's also not a pure Republic either.  Specifically, we have a form of government that is best described as a representative democracy. There are two kinds of democracies, representative and direct.

As for republics, the only feature you really need to qualify as one is that the representatives make the political decisions in the government. The electors could be the whole of the body politic (with some restrictions on age and registration requirements), as in the US (except for president as many of us were shocked to learn in 2000 and 2016), or they can be a specific group of people appointed, elected, by right of inheritance or by lot for that matter.


Also, republics do not have to bind themselves to a constitution. When they do it's called a constitutional republic. On another fly in the pedantic ointment is the fact that we have several layers of government federal, state, local, and the most dangerous form of government to liberty ever devised ... the homeowners association (which is basically an elected dictatorship). All of these levels have different elements of representative and direct democracy. Many states and localities have provisions on voter referendums. This is classic direct democracy in action.

But why am I bringing all of this up? Well, anytime someone tries to make a point in an online debate they will invariably describe the government of the US as a democracy. At that point, some wisenheimer will derail the entire discussion, by pointing out that the founding father was distrustful of direct democracy and gave us a republic instead. This is typically done to get the discussion off track, or just to prove how super-duper star-spangled awesome they are. It never really makes any difference to the subject at hand and it's almost always self-serving.

Even in the era of the framers of our government "democracy" was always used as a shorthand for a representative democracy:

While it's true that some Framing-era commentators made arguments that distinguished “democracy” and “republic”; see, for instance, The Federalist (No. 10), though even that first draws the distinction between “pure democracy” and a “republic,” only later just saying “democracy.” But even in that era, “representative democracy” was understood as a form of democracy, alongside “pure democracy”: John Adams used the term “representative democracy” in 1794; so did Noah Webster in 1785; so did St. George Tucker in his 1803 edition of Blackstone; so did Thomas Jefferson in 1815. Tucker’s Blackstone likewise uses “democracy” to describe a representative democracy, even when the qualifier “representative” is omitted." The Volokh Conspiracy 13, May, 2105

So the founders were all over the map, but typically they only made the distinction when they were directly talking about the two forms of government and used "democracy" most other times. I mean have you ever tried to write with a quill? You would leave out extraneous words too.

So the next time some pedantic git makes this utterly useless observation fight fire with fire and tell them in the smarmiest way possible that the correct way to describe our system of government is ...

A Federal Constitutional Representative Democracy