I have a new essay on the topic.
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I have a new essay on a long-standing topic, the phrase “we are a republic, not a democracy,” up at Liberal Currents: Is the United States of America a Republic, and not a Democracy?
While a lot of the discussion will be familiar to OTB readers, it is my fullest attempt to outline the basic problem with the phrase, as backed by some ongoing research I hope to further expand upon in the future.
I also wrote it to dovetail with our pending 250th birthday.
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A few days ago a letter writer to my local SW FL semi-pro newspaper listed 12 points they thought almost everyone agreed with. The first was
We are a Republic and not a Democracy, as our Constitution states
Le sigh.
The letter is a fine distillation of MAGA. Of the twelve points, I agree with two and strongly disagree with a couple. And strictly speaking, I believe the Constitution says the states will have “a Republican Form of Government”, not the country. What was it the Onion said, “Local man strongly supports what he thinks Constitution says.”
“Le sigh” indeed. My favorite part of the linked letter…
Regardless of political affiliation I believe the vast majority of the people in our country share most of the following:
…is the author’s confidently professing that their beliefs about America are unequivocally everyone else’s beliefs and then proceeding to prove himself profoundly wrong. It’s what makes the letter so MAGA – absolute certainty despite all evidence to the contrary.
When the title of your piece popped up in my RSS feed over at Liberal Currents my first thought was “I really hope this is by Prof Taylor,” and it did not disappoint. I continue to struggle to understand what point people who throw this phrase around are trying to make. It’s as if they think by employing these words people will magically agree with the odious views they are attempting to support with it. And perhaps it is just another one of those words/phrases MAGA seems so enamored of because it means they exactly whatever they want it to mean from moment to moment
I usually encounter the expression in comments threads. It is used to rebut any arguments the commenter disagrees with that deplore something as undemocratic. To the extent the people using it bother to do anything more than assert it, they usually present a false dichotomy of “republic” vs “pure democracy”, as if they’d never heard of a “representative democracy”.
In other words the phrase is not deployed as part of a coherent argument. Like reflexive references to the fake enemy media, it’s a standard MAGA rhetorical tool to cut off debate without having to resort to evidence or logic.
Thanks! It was useful to know I was writing to an audience that was unfamiliar with my previous writings. Plus the ongoing stuff here at OTB, plus a talk I gave about two years ago at Berry College, plus some research I have been doing, has helped focus my mind on the topic.
The minoritarian impulse that we are seeing in contemporary politics has also provided some clarity.
