Is the United States a Democracy or a Republic?

There is considerable debate among people in the United States over whether this country is supposed to be a democracy, a republic, or both. Generally, liberals and progressives tend to argue that the United States should be both a democracy and a republic, while conservatives tend to argue that it should only be a republic.

In this article, I want to examine the history of this debate, look at the etymologies and definitions of the words republic and democracy, and decide which of these words best describes the form of government that exists in the United States.

The debate over democracy

The debate in the United States over whether democracy is a good form of government has been going on ever since the country was first founded over two hundred years ago. Most of the Founding Fathers of the United States were strongly opposed to the idea of democracy. John Adams (lived 1735 – 1826), who was one of the more conservative Founding Fathers, wrote in letter to John Taylor dated to 17 December 1814:

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

Even more radical Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson (lived 1743 – 1826) preferred to call to the United States a “republic,” rather than a “democracy.” Only the most radical of all revolutionaries in the founders’ generation dared voice support for democracy.

This gradually changed in the early nineteenth century, as the idea of democracy gradually became more widely embraced. When supporters of Andrew Jackson (lived 1767 – 1845) founded a new political party in 1828, they called it the “Democratic Party.” Although the Democratic Party has changed its party platform significantly since the time of Andrew Jackson, it remains one of the two dominant political parties in the United States today.

Later, when the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville (lived 1805 – 1859) published his famous book on the culture and government of the United States in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, he called it, in French, De La Démocratie en Amérique. In English, this book is normally known as Democracy in America.

At some point between the generation of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and the generation of Andrew Jackson and Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy went from being seen as a fringe idea to being seen as something admirable.

ABOVE: Portrait of John Adams, painted between c. 1800 and c. 1815 by Gilbert Stuart. Adams was most certainly not a fan of democracy.

Modern conservative opposition to democracy

Many conservatives today, though, are still radically opposed to the idea of democracy. They see democracy as something evil, dangerous, and utterly antithetical to the values the United States was founded on. Not all conservatives feel this way, but many of them do.

To give an example of this, on 2 November 2019, I wrote an answer to the question “Who is currently in charge of the United States?” in which I argued that we should not speak of the president as being “in charge” of the country because this wording implies that the president has authoritarian power. I wrote, “The moment we start saying that one person is ‘in charge’ is the moment we admit that democracy is dead.”

On 6 April 2020, an individual by the name of Robert Carr left a revealing comment on my answer in which he said this:

Most of what Carr says here is rooted in misunderstanding, but this comment reveals the deep enmity that many conservatives in the United States have towards the idea of democracy.

There is a popular saying among conservatives that goes like this: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner.” This saying is often misattributed to the Founding Father Benjamin Franklin (lived 1706 – 1790), but Franklin certainly did not say it, since the oldest known version of this saying is first attested in a Usenet group post dated to 23 April 1990. The saying seems to have only become attributed to Franklin at some point within the past thirty years.

ABOVE: Portrait of the American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin painted in 1778 by the French portrait painter Joseph Duplessis. Contrary to popular belief, Benjamin Franklin certainly did not say, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner.”

The United States as a republic

So, is the United States a republic, a democracy, or both? Let’s start with what almost everyone seems to agree on. I think virtually everyone would agree that, according the United States Constitution, this country is supposed to be a republic. The Founding Fathers considered the United States to be a republic and most people today consider it to be a republic as well.

The definition of a republic is pretty much uncontroversial. The word republic comes from the Latin phrase res publica, which is composed of the fifth-declension feminine noun res, meaning “thing,” “matter,” “deed,” or “affair,” and publica, the feminine form of the adjective publicus, meaning “public.” The word republic, then, literally means “the public thing.”

A republic is therefore, according to Merriam-Webster, “a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law.” By this definition, the United States is clearly supposed to be a republic. The real question here is whether we are also a democracy.

ABOVE: Fresco of the ancient Roman Senate, painted 1882–1888 by the Italian painter Cesare Maccari

The United States as a democracy

The answer to the question of whether or not the United States is a democracy ultimately depends on your definition of the word democracy.

The English word democracy comes from the ancient Greek first-declension feminine noun δημοκρατία (dēmokratía), which is formed from the second-declension masculine noun δῆμος (dêmos), meaning “populace,” and the third-declension neuter noun κράτος (krátos), meaning “power” or “authority.” (Incidentally, the word κράτος is also the name of the god Kratos, who, as I discuss in this article from March 2020, is actually a real god in Greek mythology, albeit a minor one.) Thus, the word democracy literally means “populace-power” or “power of the populace.”

In ancient Athens, δημοκρατία meant that the people themselves voted directly on all the issues, rather than electing representatives to make decisions on those issues for them. Some people who are really sticklers for precise definitions would therefore argue that this is the only thing a democracy can be and that anything other than an Athenian-style direct democracy does not really count as a democracy. If this is the case, then the United States is only a republic and not a democracy, because the people themselves do not directly vote on the issues.

The problem with this notion is that, in modern times, the word democracy is usually interpreted more generally to refer to any kind of government in which the ultimate ruling authority rests in the hands of the people. According to this definition of the word—which is how the word is most commonly used—a democracy can be either a government in which the people directly rule themselves without representatives (i.e. “direct democracy”) or a government in which people elect representatives to make decisions on issues (i.e. “representative democracy”).

Most sources seem to generally agree with this definition of the word:

• Merriam-Webster defines democracy as “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”

• Wikipedia defines democracy as “a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting. In a direct democracy, the citizens as a whole form a governing body and vote directly on each issue. In a representative democracy, the citizens elect representatives from among themselves.”

• Wiktionary defines democracy as “rule by the people, especially as a form of government; either directly or through elected representatives.”

• Dictionary.com defines democracy as “government by the people; 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.

• The Oxford English Dictionary defines democracy as “government by the people; esp. a system of government in which all the people of a state or polity (or, esp. formerly, a subset of them meeting particular conditions) are involved in making decisions about its affairs, typically by voting to elect representatives to a parliament or similar assembly; (more generally) a system of decision-making within an institution, organization, etc., in which all members have the right to take part or vote. In later use often more widely, with reference to the conditions characteristically obtaining under such a system: a form of society in which all citizens have equal rights, ignoring hereditary distinctions of class or rank, and the views of all are tolerated and respected; the principle of fair and equal treatment of everyone in a state, institution, organization, etc.”

By any of these definitions, the United States is clearly supposed to be both a representative democracy and a republic.

ABOVE: Painting by the German history painter Philipp Foltz (lived 1805 – 1877) showing the great statesman Perikles addressing the Athenian Assembly on the Pnyx

What about the wolves and the lamb?

As for that accusation by conservatives that “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner,” I don’t think that this is an accurate assessment of a truly democratic government. Any government in which all decisions are made purely by majority vote and there are no protections for minorities cannot be a true democracy.

When we say that democracy is “the power of the populace,” we mean the entire populace, not just the majority. The populace cannot have true power if any portion of that populace is forced to live in fear of the majority. A government in which there are no protections for the rights of minorities is not a democracy; it is an ochlocracy—a government that is ruled by a mob.

The United States is certainly an imperfect democracy, but it is a democracy nonetheless, at least for the moment.