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Constitutional Republic, so no, we are not a democracy, and furthermore the men who founded this nation and established the government thereof rather despised d

• dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Constitutional Republic, so no, we are not a democracy "Constitutional Republic" and democracy are orthogonal rather than mutually exclusive descriptions. All "Constitutional Republic" means is that it isn't a monarchy and that it has some fundamental governing law. Being a (direct or indirect/representative) democracy is perfectly compatible with that. The foundational concept of government by consent of the governed and of government--as it would be elegantly described somewhat later--"of the people, by the people, and for the people" embraced by the founders is exactly that of representative democracy. The actual specific form written into the Constitution both clearly intends something very much like representative democracy while not quite being one. > and furthermore the men who founded this nation and established the government thereof rather despised democracy as tyranny of the ignorant masses. They despised both direct and unconstrained democracy, but while the pragmatic compromise of the Constitution clearly fell short of this, many of them certainly embraced in principle limited government by consent of the masses expressed through a combination of equal suffrage in approval of a basic law and equal suffrage in electing representatives to the government under that law, or, in the language of modern political science, Constitutionally-limited representative democracy.