Is America a Republic or Democracy?

You have heard this line, probably from someone who sounded very sure of themselves: America is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. And they say it like it's some witty response to a question no one asked, or like some kid from school who started his responses by saying "well, actually." You know the one. That kid was me. But anyway — are these people right?

Have we been fed a lie our entire lives, and the United States isn't a democracy? Was Reagan wrong when he said, "We know what real democracy constitutes; we understand its implications"? Was Lincoln wrong when he said, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth"? Here's where the lines get crossed. The claim that America is a constitutional republic, not a democracy, is half right — but it's also half wrong.

It all rests on treating "republic" and "democracy" as opposites, when one is just a type of the other. It's like saying, "that's not a car, it's a 2013 Honda Civic." By the end of this video you'll know exactly what a republic is, what a democracy is, and why the United States has always been comfortably both at once.

The claim that the US is a constitutional republic, not a democracy, isn't a modern invention. It has roots going back almost 250 years. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison, author of the Constitution and future president, drew a real distinction. He used "democracy" specifically to mean direct democracy — citizens voting on laws themselves, in person, the way ancient Athens sometimes did. He used "republic" to mean a system where citizens elect representatives to do that voting for them.

Madison actually preferred the republic, because he thought direct democracy was prone to what he called the passions of the moment — majorities trampling minorities without any filter in between. That is a real and serious argument, at least it was in 1787.

At that point the world was full of monarchies, with only a handful of republics like Switzerland or the Venetian, and later the Dutch, Republics. The new United States was still finding its footing in this brave new world, and Madison didn't have much to go with or compare it to. So the founders built in checks to keep "we the people" from running away with everything, like the Electoral College and an independent judiciary.

Even though nearly all the states award their electoral votes to whoever won the most votes, and the judiciary is selected by people who won their own elections, these are one step removed from democracy. But Madison was using "democracy" as he understood it in 1787. It was a narrow definition limited only to direct democracy, a form of government where eligible male citizens voted directly on laws. To Madison, the only options were monarchy, which they had just gotten rid of, or a republic. But the world kept turning, and things evolved.

Modern political science doesn't use "democracy" to mean only direct democracy, where every voter votes on every law. Outside of a few Swiss cantons or towns in New England, that form hasn't really existed anywhere for a couple thousand years, because it's unwieldy and would grind everything to a halt in a country of 350 million people. Today we use "democracy" to mean a system where political power derives from the consent of the governed, expressed through free and fair elections. Webster's Dictionary's entry for democracy offers several definitions; look at 1a: "a form of government in which the people elect representatives to make decisions, policies, laws, etc. according to law." Or, as Lincoln so eloquently put it at Gettysburg, "of the people, by the people, for the people."

Flip ahead a few pages to "republic": "a form of government in which the power belongs to a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by the leaders and representatives elected by those citizens to govern according to law." Under these definitions, a republic is a subtype of democracy, not its opposite. Our form of government is a republic because we have a body of citizens entitled to vote on the laws — that's Congress — but it's democratic because we the people vote for those elected leaders. A republic is simply a representative government where the head of state is not a hereditary monarch. That's the actual technical distinction: republic versus monarchy, not republic versus democracy.

Having elected representatives may make a country a "republic" on paper, but democracy is a different matter entirely, one that depends on whether those elections are free and fair. You can be a republic and not a democracy. The most famous undemocratic constitutional republic was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR.

Constitution? Check.

Leaders elected to pass laws on citizens' behalf? Check.

Democracy? No, because those elections were neither free nor fair, since only Communists were allowed to appear on the ballot.

Today, look at the People's Republic of China or North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Since they hold elections and their heads of state aren't "officially" hereditary, they're republics, even though North Korea functions as an absolute monarchy regardless of the name. In fact, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, there are 49 countries that qualify as undemocratic republics.

If you want to compare the United States to authoritarian regimes like the Central African Republic or Iran, that's your prerogative. And you can be both a democracy and a monarchy — look at Canada, the UK, Sweden, or Japan. They have hereditary heads of state, but actual lawmaking power resides with the elected members of the House of Commons, the Swedish Riksdag, or the Japanese Diet. So "republic" and "democracy" aren't opposites: a country can be a democratic republic or a democratic monarchy, but "not a democracy" isn't what separates them. And that's not some clever loophole in the American system.

The filibuster or the Electoral College may be anti-democratic in certain respects, but that doesn't negate the fact that senators are directly elected by the people, or that the Electoral College awards each state's electors to the candidate who won that state's popular vote, a result that has also aligned with the national popular vote 55 out of 60 times.

There's a reason this claim resurfaces across social media every few months. It tends to appear whenever an unpopular politician becomes even more unpopular, and their supporters repeat it as a way of saying the polls don't matter, that the politician doesn't have to do what the public wants. And while that's technically true, the president can act within the bounds of the Constitution regardless of approval ratings, this line is often used in bad faith, to argue that democratic principles like one person, one vote don't apply, or that clearly undemocratic, anti-American ideas or policies are acceptable. It's noise, and it's wrong. Here's the version of this argument you'll actually run into: someone points out that the loser of the popular vote has won the presidency, and the reply comes back instantly, "doesn't matter, we're a republic, not a democracy."

That reply isn't explaining the Electoral College. It's a rhetorical shortcut meant to end the conversation before the actual argument begins, usually because there's no argument to back it up. You can defend the Electoral College on its actual merits: federalism, protecting smaller states, forcing broad geographic coalitions, and so on. What you can't do is use "we're a republic" to avoid having that conversation. And it conveniently ignores the fact that no federal law requires states to award their electors this way, as Maine and Nebraska demonstrate.

So, in the end, where does that leave us? If you can't even define what type of government you have, what do you actually stand for? America is a republic, meaning it has no hereditary monarch, no matter how badly some might want to be one. The United States is a republic in the same sense as France, Germany, India, or Brazil, and no serious person in any of those countries thinks their government is anything other than a full democracy. We also have leaders elected on our behalf to make the laws.

But because those leaders are elected, America is also a representative democracy, meaning political power flows from elections rather than birthright or force. Republic and democracy are not mutually exclusive terms. They're two words describing the same system from two different angles: one is the mechanism by which laws are passed, the other is how we select the people who pass them. That said, this isn't an argument for mob rule, and allowing anything simply because it's popular has its own term: populism. But populism also ignores every check against it, every law, every cultural norm that kept a given policy from being passed in the first place.

No serious person today defines democracy as everyone voting on everything, all the time. That's not realistic. People vote for their representatives. That's democracy. End of story.

Those who argue otherwise are typically doing so in bad faith, chasing engagement or attempting to justify unpopular policies pushed through by unpopular politicians, as if the public won't eventually have their say come November. Hope that clears things up. See you next time.