Republic or democracy?

What's in a name?

Sometimes when I give lectures, certain listeners dispute my description of the United States as a democracy. “We are not a democracy but a republic” is the gist of the objections.

Are they right?

The answer depends on what people mean by democracy and by republic. Given the context of my lectures, it also depends on what people in the past meant by democracy and by republic.

Democracy derives from Greek. It meant rule by the demos — the people. In some of city-states of ancient Greece, the people ruled directly, casting votes on proposed legislation and other public measures. The practice was picked up much later by New England towns and villages. In both cases modest size was a requisite. All the people, or at least all the voting people, had to be able to gather in one place at one time.

Republic comes from Latin. It meant the affairs of the people. Rome originally had a king. But the Romans got rid of the king and arranged for the people to rule. Not all the people, but enough to make plausible the idea of popular rule. In time they got rid of popular rule in favor of rule by an emperor. Retrospectively, the Roman republic was that stage of Rome's political evolution between the kings and the emperors. As it happened, during this stage Rome was large enough that not all the people could be gathered in one place to vote on prospective laws. Instead the people delegated representatives to vote on their behalf. Consequently the term republic connoted the practice of representative government based on the principle of popular rule.

At the time of America's founding, republic was commonly used to convey what the founders were trying to achieve. They were dispensing with their king, as the Romans had done. They were basing the successor government on popular rule, per the natural rights philosophy articulated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. They were doing this in the Continental Congress, in which the people of the several states were represented by delegates. Republic was the obvious label to apply to the new United States of America.

Yet in the states, something closer to democracy was practiced. New England still had its town meetings. And the events that culminated in the revolution often originated in the streets, where ordinary people played a direct and decisive role. The term democracy was revived and adapted to emphasize the popular element in the politics of the revolution.

While the war against Britain and George III lasted, democrats and republicans saw no reason to split hairs between their two groups. But no sooner had the war ended than distinctions began to surface. The democrats wanted state governments constrained in their powers and answerable to the people at frequent intervals. They wanted a national government that was largely subordinate to the states.

Everyone realized that the states were not direct democracies like the Greek city-states or the New England town meetings. They were too big. Even the most democratic of them had systems of representation, namely state legislatures. Yet in the minds of the democrats, this didn't prevent them from being democracies.

The contest over ratifying the Constitution was fought between anti-democrats, who wanted a federal government more removed from the people, and the democrats, who preferred the state-centric status quo under the Articles of Confederation. The former group called themselves Federalists, leaving the latter to be branded Antifederalists.

In this debate James Madison was a Federalist. Madison was more responsible than anyone else for the new Constitution. And in Federalist 10, one of a series of pro-ratification essays, he distinguished republics from democracies. “The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.” Madison made clear in this essay that he was speaking about direct democracy. In country as large as the United States, direct democracy was impossible. Ergo the only viable option was a republic.

Madison wasn't being fair to the Antifederalists. None of them contended that the United States should be governed by direct democracy. That was ludicrous. What they were saying was that they wanted a government that was more democratic than the one the Federalists sought.

The Antifederalists lost. The Constitution was ratified, greatly strengthening the national government. Not willing to let themselves be mislabeled again, the Antifederalists adopted a new name: Republicans. This didn't prevent the Federalists from calling them democrats and damning them for promoting mob rule. Many of the Republicans had a soft spot for the French revolution, which by then had descended into a reign of terror. This made the link between democracy and mob rule more plausible and more chilling.

Which was one reason Jefferson and most Republicans avoided the term democrat. “We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists,” Jefferson said in his 1801 inaugural address. Jefferson's usage didn't prevent textbook writers of later generations from calling the Jeffersonians “Democratic-Republicans," largely to distinguish them from the modern Republicans of the 1850s and after. By then Jefferson's Republicans had become the Democrats, so the labeling was logical if anachronistic.

The first president to utter the word democracy in an official capacity was John Quincy Adams. In his 1825 inaugural address, Adams referred to the United States as a "confederated representative democracy.” The right to vote had expanded since Jefferson's presidency, making America intrinsically more democratic. In addition, the Federalists had imploded after flirting with secession amid the War of 1812, and with them disappeared the scaremongering surrounding the term democracy. Adams was the least democratically minded of the candidates in the four-way 1824 race, but he evinced no compunction in calling America a democracy, even if he qualified it with two adjectives.

The first president of the second Republican party, Abraham Lincoln, dispensed with the adjectives in front of democracy. Indeed, he felt obliged to qualify republic. In a message to Congress in July 1861, Lincoln said of the challenge of militant secession: "It presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic, or democracy—a government of the people by the same people—can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes."

Lincoln's Republican descendant Theodore Roosevelt treated republic and democracy as synonyms. “It is, of course, a perfectly trite saying that in no country is it so necessary to have decency, honesty, self-restraint, in the average citizen as in a republic, in a democracy," Roosevelt said in characteristically sermonizing mode. On a different occasion but in the same mode, Roosevelt left republic out of the formula. “A great democracy like ours, a democracy based upon the principles of orderly liberty, can be perpetuated only if in the heart of ordinary citizens there dwells a keen sense of righteousness and justice."

What Roosevelt, the most powerful vote-getter of his era, realized was that democracy had a popular appeal republicanism didn't. Democracy inclusively connoted trust in the people, while republicanism standoffishly smacked of skepticism. Whatever the factual basis for trust or skepticism, candidates felt obliged to avow their trust in people whose votes they were soliciting.

By TR’s time, democracy and republic were essentially synonyms in American usage. They weren't identical. Democracy denoted a process as well as a country that practiced that process. Thus a person could speak of "democracy” in general as well as "a democracy.” Republic was used only in the latter sense.

Democrats tended to use the term democracy more freely than Republicans, advertising their party in the process. In fact during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Democrats referred to their party as “the Democracy." In the late 20th century some Republicans stopped using "Democratic party” to refer to their rivals, insisting on "Democrat party.”

Today Republicans are more likely than Democrats to raise their hands in my lectures to summon the 18th century and insist that the United States is not a democracy but a republic. Yet they rarely press the issue, realizing that in general practice this has become a distinction without a difference.