Who knew that America was filled with so many amateur social studies teachers?
Whenever I write about Republican-led efforts to sharply curtail voting rights (which disproportionately impact Black and brown voters who tend to support Democrats), I’ll often get a letter from aggrieved conservative readers who remind me, “John, you of all people should know we’re a republic and not a democracy.”
Strictly speaking, those readers are correct. We’re not a direct democracy. But the notes came with such startling regularity, that I had to ask myself: After decades of sending American forces around the world to spread and defend our very particular brand of democracy, what did conservatives suddenly have against it?
The answer came in the form of a November essay in The Atlantic by Claremont McKenna College political scientist George Thomas, who argued why the GOP’s sudden insistence on this semantic distinction is a “dangerous and wrong argument.”
“Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it,” Thomas argues, pointing to such Republicans as Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who have been trotting out this corrosive chestnut as a way to justify the limited kind of political participation envisioned by the current incarnation of the GOP.
“The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called ‘pure’ democracy and defended the American experiment as ‘wholly republican,’” Thomas writes. “To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic, was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. It misses, too, how we understand the idea of democracy today.”…
… Republicans who wanted [want] to “make America great again” were looking back to a very specific and mythologized view of the country: One that preserved the rights and privileges of a white majority.