The Difference Between a Democracy and a Republic
If you ask Americans to name their country’s form of federal government, the majority of them will state they reside in a democracy. The genuine answer is more complex (and unanticipated) than that. Robert George, Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, discusses.
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Script:.
At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1789, legend has it that a woman called out to Benjamin Franklin to ask what type of federal government the delegates had actually developed. Franklin reacted “… a republic, madam. If you can keep it.”.
A republic?
Should not Franklin have stated “a democracy”?
Isn’t that what we have in the United States?
Many people today would say “yes.”.
If our nation isn’t a democracy, what is it? That’s actually what democracy indicates in the original Greek– demonstrations kratos– the individuals (demonstrations) guideline (kratos).
However let’s stop briefly for a minute and think about more deeply what the word indicates in practice and why the delegates in Philadelphia rejected it.
That’s right– rejected it.
Our federal government was established by a nationwide charter– the Constitution of the United States. We are governed by the institutions, and according to the principles and rules, created and adopted when our forefathers validated that document, making it “the Supreme Law of the land.”.
Are those institutions properly speaking democratic?
The men who bequeathed our form of government to us– those we call our starting fathers– didn’t see it that way.
They understood the institutions developed by the Constitution to be republic.
Though the founders thought in “government of the individuals, by the people, for the people” as Abraham Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address, they did not believe in pure or unrestricted democracy. They feared that democracy, strictly speaking, included within it the impulse to mob guideline– the stifling of civil liberty, the trampling by majorities of the rights of minorities.
To put it more candidly, pure democracy frightened them.
While they constructed into the Constitution significant democratic elements, they likewise built in non-democratic features to safeguard liberty and avoid tyranny. It wasn’t merely that they favored representative government over direct democracy, though they did; it’s that they rejected the idea that “the majority wins” was by meaning the just outcome.
Undoubtedly, in what is possibly the most well-known of the eighty-five Federalist Papers– Federalist 10– James Madison, precisely in distinguishing a democracy, which he did not favor, from a republic, which he did, noted that a vital advantage of republicanism is “to improve … the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of residents, whose knowledge might best determine the real interests of the country …”.
And, so, we have representative federal government, and more than that, we have a bicameral (that is, two-tiered) legislature– a Congress with an extremely democratic House of Representatives and a not-very-democratic Senate.
For that reason, California, with its massive population, has fifty-two agents in your home. Wyoming has one.
Yet Wyoming has 2 Senators– the same number as California and every other state.
A pure democrat would state, “that’s unfair!” Each Wyoming citizen has much more power than every Californian.
A republican would state, well, we aren’t and shouldn’t be a pure democracy. If we were large population states like California would overwhelm the requirements and interests of small population states like Wyoming.
That’s why we’re called the United States of America. Each state has its own different identity; holds its own separate elections. Simply as we do not want a single person or small group of individuals to control our government, we don’t one state or a couple of states to control our government.
A republic is a way of diffusing power– and a dazzling one at that.
For the total script in addition to FACTS & SOURCES, go to https://www.prageru.com/video/the-difference-between-a-democracy-and-a-republic.
source
If you ask Americans to name their country’s type of government, most of them will state they live in a democracy. At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1789, legend has it that a lady called out to Benjamin Franklin to ask what kind of government the delegates had actually produced. If our nation isn’t a democracy, what is it? That’s actually what democracy implies in the original Greek– demos kratos– the people (demos) guideline (kratos).
Simply as we don’t want one person or small group of people to control our federal government, we don’t one state or a few states to control our government.
