Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Invariably, whenever the word “democracy” is used to describe America, someone responds with the word “republic” as a kind of rebuke, as in: America isn't a democracy, it's a republic; though practically speaking, a republic is just geography-based democracy. Unfortunately, due to poor education, a lot of people are under the mistaken belief that America is supposed to be a popular democracy, probably because that’s how they selected the most popular person in high school, and their local elections operate like that. Tellingly, the U.S. Constitution doesn't even mention democracy, but it does describe how a republic works, and which people can't be denied a vote if there happens to be one.

The distinction between a democracy and a republic is an important one at the national level because both chambers of congress are representative: the Senate at the State level, and the House at the Congressional District level. Plus, there's the Electoral College, the main target of plurality democracy advocates, because several presidents have been elected by the representative republic over the popular vote; two in the recent past. In comparison, though America is not a true democracy, Russia and China are; so our representative republic seems to have worked out okay.