Democrats are now talking about “saving democracy.”
“Democracy” technically means that if we’re all in a room together and we want to make a decision, we all vote on that specific decision. A republic means you have representatives, which means you don’t vote directly on many of the decisions that are being made. Instead, you delegate the power to vote on those decisions to a representative government. Typically, that representative government has a series of checks and balances.
The United States is a republic. It is not a direct democracy. It’s a democracy in the broader sense, which is that we vote. But it’s not a democracy in the technical sense in which you vote on every issue or in which a pure majoritarian popular will decides every single issue.
In fact, the founders decried exactly such a system. They saw that as what they would call a mobocracy. They didn’t…
