By: Gary D. Barnett
I had quite a heavy response due to the article I published yesterday, The Myth of Democracy,” at Lew Rockwell. One of the comments I received was a critical reminder that the United States was founded as a “Republic,” and not a Democracy. This has been a left/right argument for some time, and even the Founders could not come to terms about this issue, and the delagates at the Constitutional Convention never settled the matter. So what is the real truth?
I think it prudent to begin with the definition of these terms. As I said in my article, the definition of democracy is “government by the people, or a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.”
So what is the definition of a republic? It is “a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.”
As one can easily see, there is little, if any difference in these terms. The age old argument, heated as it might be, is simply an exercise in futility, as any differences that may exist, are only at the margin. In fact, even the slight differences spoken about here seem irrelevant given the outcomes of these systems.
| Pure Democracy | Republic | |
|---|---|---|
| Power Held By | The population as a whole | Individual citizens |
| Making Laws | A voting majority has almost unlimited power to make laws. Minorities have few protections from the will of the majority. | The people elect representatives to make laws according to the constraints of a constitution. |
| Ruled by | The majority. | Laws made by elected representatives of the people. |
| Protection of Rights | Rights can be overridden by the will of the majority. | A constitution protects the rights of all people from the will of the majority. |
| Early Examples | Athenian democracy in Greece (500 BCE) | The Roman Republic (509 BCE) |
This chart may seem confusing, but it is not. It is just contradictory, and contradiction considering political terms is normally designed obsolescence. Both definitions allow for representatives elected by a majority to rule and make laws. In a pure democracy, the majority supposedly rules without limit, and in a republic, the majority rules through its elected representatives by proxy supposedly bound by a worthless constitution. Either way, the majority rules. This is only in theory however, because in reality, the people are controlled due to their own efforts to transfer power to a ruling elite. While it has been put forth that there is a difference in the “population” as opposed to individual citizens, that is poppycock. In any “representative” society, there is no difference at all.
There is a reason why this country has a two party system, one Republican and one Democrat. Those attempting to distinguish one from the other on the basis of quality and separation are foolish beyond recognition. Their argument describes two sides of the same coin. One is a lie, and the other is also a lie, and so it goes.
This is why the idiocy of voting, where the citizenry is brainwashed into believing that “their vote counts,” was designed to give the impression of popular control where none exists. It has always been a top down system with a ruling class and a proletariat, and regardless whether a Democracy or a Republic, the result is always tyrannical.
The final word by those who define these systems is that the United States, like most modern nations, is neither a pure republic nor a pure democracy. Instead, it is a hybrid democratic republic. So there you have it, two failed competing ideologies that are virtually identical systems melded together to form what acts as majority rule system either way.
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