Democracy or Republic, Which is it?

DEMOCRACY OR REPUBLIC,
WHICH IS IT?

By Benedict D. LaRosa

INTRODUCTION

Several years ago, a caller to the Larry King television
talk show asked the guest, a Congressman, to explain the
difference between a democracy and a republic. The
Congressman responded that there was no difference; the two
words were synonymous. Intrigued by the ignorance of this
apparently intelligent, well-meaning man who had sworn to
uphold the Constitution of the United States, I consulted
several dictionaries. None of them considered the two words
synonymous, though all described them in similar terms.
Little wonder, then, that the words are used interchangeably
today. To the founders of this country, however, there was a
world of difference between the two. Even Heinrich Muller,
Chief of the Gestapo, recognized this. In an interview given
to the Central Intelligence Agency in 1948 at his home in
Switzerland, Muller said:

Here, in Switzerland, is the only real democracy in the
world. You in American have a republic, not a democracy.
There is a real difference there.

Is the distinction merely the rambling of politically
incorrect 18th century tax protesters, or are there real
difference between the two forms of government?

MISCONCEPTION

Although we hear the term democracy used constantly in
reference to our form of government, the word does not
appear in either the Declaration of Independence or the
Constitution of the United States, our two fundamental
documents. Indeed, Article IV, Section 4, of the
constitution "guarantees to every State in this union a
Republican Form of Government." In addition, we sing
the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and pledge allegiance to
the flag of "the Republic for which it stands."

On the contrary, the founders saw great danger in
democracy. Tom Paine, that firebrand of the American
Revolution, considered democracy the vilest form of
government. In describing the purpose of the Constitutional
Convention of 1787, Virginia delegate Edmund Randolph
commented:

The general object was to provide a cure for the evils
under which the United States labored; that in tracing these
evils to their origin, every man had found it in the
turbulence and follies of democracy.

Thirty-eight years after the Declaration of Independence,
John Adams warned:

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes,
exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy
that did not commit suicide.

John Marshall, chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1801
to 1835 observed:

Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference
is like that between order and chaos.

As late as 1928, the "Citizenship" chapter of
U.S. War Department training manual TM 2000-25 expressed the
opinion:

Democracy... has been repeatedly tried without success. Our
Constitutional fathers... made a very marked distinction
between a republic and a democracy... and said repeatedly
and emphatically that they had founded a republic.

One of America's outstanding historians, Charles Austin
Beard (1874-1948), put it succinctly:

At no time, at no place in solemn convention assembled,
through no chosen agents, had the American people officially
proclaimed the United States to be a democracy. The
Constitution did not contain the word or any word lending
countenance to it....

Why, then, do we call ourselves a democracy, and does it
really make any difference?

WHAT IS A DEMOCRACY?

The origin of the word democracy comes from the Greek
demos, meaning people, and kratos, meaning government.
Literally, democracy means government by or of the people.

In a democracy, the majority rules either directly, or
through elected representatives or appointed officials,
without the restraint embodied in a fixed body of law. The
law is whatever an official organ of government determines
it is. ("The law is in their mouth," as was said
of absolute monarchs.) It is rule by whim rather than law,
by emotion rather than reason. Individuals have no inherent
rights, but are considered the products of history (slavery,
the renaissance, dark ages, etc.), culture (western,
oriental, etc.), class (nobility, merchant, artisan,
peasant, etc.), gender (male or female), race (Caucasian,
Negroid, etc.), religion (Protestant, Catholic, Hindu,
Moslem, Jewish, etc.), etc., and are classified and
categorized accordingly. Rights emanate from the mass will
or power. The purpose of government is to satisfy needs
(food, clothing, shelter, education, healthcare, etc.). It
is government by conflicting biases with the result that
members of politically powerful constituencies receive
privileges because of their classification within certain
categories rather than on merit at the expense of everyone
else. The racial and other quotas under Affirmative Action
are an example.

The laws are political or man-made, and reflect not truth
and justice, but power. They are a mass of ad hoc decisions
produced through lobbying, geared to expediency, concerned
more with immediate consequences and less with consistency
or continuity. Gun control and drug laws are prime examples.
They are based on the emotional reaction to societal
problems for which the misuse of guns and drugs are merely
the symptom. Despite overwhelming evidence that such laws
not only don't work, but actually encourage lawlessness,
those who support them demand more draconian measures in the
face of their repeated failures. As a consequences, our
prisons fill with peaceful people who merely want to defend
themselves or relax with a drug which is, at most, harmful
only to themselves, while murderers, rapists, and robbers
are set free to make room for these political prisoners.

Political law creates advantage. Therefore, political
factions compete to control the law-making process.
Government power is a prize to be won for the benefit of the
winners at the expense of the losers. The law becomes an
instrument used by the winners against their opponents.
Officers of the law are appropriately called law enforcement
officers or policemen (from the Greek, Latin, and French to
regulate, control, or cleanup). Their primary role is to
enforce the corporate will, and protect the power of the
state. The military is an instrument of foreign and, at
times, domestic policy. Taxes are imposed without the
individual's consent, and are used to reward and punish
as well as pay for legitimate government functions.

People vote for what they want, not what is right. The
public looks to the political class for moral leadership.
Public and private morality are considered the same which
justifies making private morality public policy. Thus what
one does in the privacy of his own home with consenting
adults (gambling, for example) must meet the same standard
as for public behavior. As a result, vices become crimes,
and the exercise of certain freedoms becomes criminal
activity. What is lawful today may not be tomorrow, and an
individual considered law-abiding one day, may be a criminal
the next, though his behavior has not changed.

Restraint is upon the individual. Rights are relative and
take the form of privileges granted through government
licenses and permits, or simply permissions revocable at the
whim of those in power. The will of one segment of society
-- the majority -- is imposed on everyone. Government acts
like a hammer punishing violations of majority standards as
enacted by legislation. Consent of the governed is
meaningless, for such governments exercise their powers over
anyone they choose.

Democracy concentrates power into the hands of the few
organized and clever enough to manipulate the masses. It is
characterized by a communistic attitude toward property and
monopolistic enterprises. Government thus becomes an
instrument for the redistribution of wealth as well as the
security of the state. It is the rule of men, the
dictatorship of the majority without regard to the
consequences upon individuals or society.

WHAT IS A REPUBLIC?

The word republic is from the Latin res, which means thing,
affair or interest, and publica which means of everybody.
It literally means everybody's thing or interest.

The Declaration of Independence contains the principles of
republican government: that all men are created with equal,
unalienable rights, that governments are formed by men to
secure these rights, and that governments derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed. Upon these
principles, our forefathers established a body of law called
the Constitution of the United States to which they added a
Bill of Rights as the first ten amendments to further
restrict majority rule.

The essence of a republic is the rule of law, by which is
meant the common or scientific law, which is certain and
unchangeable. This law is discovered, not made, in that the
tendency is to find the freedoms and restraints imposed by
natural law, and base decisions upon them. ("Man cannot
make principles, he can only discover them," wrote Tom
Paine.)

Since human nature doesn't change, what was right
yesterday should be so today and tomorrow. Courts seek out
and enforce a higher law as opposed to political or man-made
law. As a result, the law seeks truth, transcends politics,
is reasonable, consistent, predictable, and reflects or
approximates natural justice. Government acts like a shield
punishing the abuses of freedoms -- assaults against the
life, liberty, and property of innocent people -- not the
freedoms themselves. For example, the misuse of a firearm
which results in injury to an innocent party would be
punished rather than the mere possession of such a weapon.
Officers of the law are appropriately called peace officers,
for they do not enforce political law, but protect everyone
equally from force and fraud. The military is used as a last
resort to protect the nation. Moral authority rests outside
the political class who are held to a high moral standard
through public pressure. Government's purpose is to
protect rights and defend freedom. Taxes are voluntary
assessments used to fund legitimate government functions
serving the common good (in obedience to John Adams'
dictum that "No man may be taxed against his
will....").

Under this form of government, individual freedom and
responsibility are maximized. The individual is sovereign
and his rights are sacrosanct. Individuals are free to act
without permission, but must never impose without consent.
Everyone has an equal right to compete in the marketplace,
succeed or fail on their own, and pursue their own happiness
restrained only by the rights of others to do the same.
Republics reject as a danger to liberty the public interest
doctrine espoused in democracies, because, as John Adams
articulated:

You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments:
rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws:
rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.

In a republic, the government has just enough power to
carry out its proper functions, but is otherwise limited,
inhibited and restricted. According to political historian,
Thomas Molnar:

The prevailing concept [of 18th century liberalism] was...
that the State should concern itself with public safety, and
should be called out -- in the form of its armed forces --
only to restrain the disorderly and crush the rebellious.

Power is decentralized, divided, and regulated by an
elaborate system of checks and balances, with the ultimate
check held by the people in the form of free and open
elections (the ballot box), trial by jury (the jury box),
and an armed citizenry (the cartridge box). The law is
neutral. No one is exempt; everyone is equal before it. All
are held fully accountable to an injured party.

Republican government is based on Tom Paine's premise
that:

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary
evil: in its worst state, an intolerable one.

Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, gave
perhaps the best description of republican government:

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from
injuring one another... shall leave them otherwise free to
regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement,
and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has
earned. This is the sum of good government....

In a republic, government is an instrument solely for
collective security in which the people are served rather
than regulated, represented rather than ruled. When the
principles of republican government are followed, free
markets spring up automatically followed by a growing middle
class, abundance, harmony, a high degree of liberty, and
ethical behavior. The emphasis is on the creation of wealth,
not the accumulation of power as in a democracy.

WHY NOT A DEMOCRACY?

John Adams summed up what a government of men brings:

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. When clear prospects are opened
before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy
gratification, it is hard for the most considerate
philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist
the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves;
nations and large bodies of men, never.

Professor Alexander Fraser Tyler, writing when the states
were still colonies of Great Britain, explained why
democracies always fail:

A Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of Government.
It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote
themselves largess of the public treasury. From that moment
on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising
the most benefits from the public treasury with the result
that Democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy,
always to be followed by a Dictatorship.

James Madison, father of the Constitution, wrote in The
Federalist No. 10:

In a pure democracy, there is nothing to check the
inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious
individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been
spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been
found incompatible with personal security or the rights of
property; and have in general been as short in their lives
as they have been violent in their deaths.

Even Plato warned, in his Republic, that, as a rule,
tyranny arises from democracy.

For these reasons, the founders of our Republic avoided a
government of men and established a government of law.

WHY THE MISCONCEPTION?

The confusion is not new. James Madison, writing in The
Federalist No. 14, refers to:

The error which limits republican government... seems to
owe its rise and prevalence chiefly to the confounding of a
republic with a democracy, applying to the former reasonings
drawn from the nature of the latter.

Madison blamed "celebrated authors" for the
confusion because they placed:

... in comparison the vices and defects of the republican,
and by citing as specimens of the latter the turbulent
democracies of ancient Greece and modern Italy. Under the
confusion of names, it has been an easy task to transfer to
a republic observations applicable to a democracy only.

Widespread use of the term democracy began with the Woodrow
Wilson administration in 1912. It was during this
administration that the anti-republican amendments -- the
16th (income tax) and 17th (popular election of senators) --
were added to our Constitution and a central bank -- the
Federal Reserve -- was established. All three acts
centralized power.

The U.S. War Department manual (mentioned above) defined
democracy and republic, and explained the difference
between both. Sometime in the 1930s, during the Franklin
Roosevelt administration, all copies were withdrawn from the
Government Printing Office and Army posts, and destroyed
without explanation.

Confusion between the two forms of government lingers today
to the detriment of not only the American people, but also
all those who look to us as an example of how to structure a
just and free society. When we understand the difference,
many of the issues which divide us will melt away. We will
then make better choices in our leaders, and demand that
government become less intrusive, abusive, and expensive,
and more responsive to our collective needs for security,
harmony, and abundance. It would not be an exaggeration to
say that the very survival of our civilization depends upon
knowing the difference between a Republic and a Democracy.

copyright © Benedict D. LaRosa

Benedict D. LaRosa is a historian and author. He earned
undergraduate and graduate degrees in history from the U.S.
Air Force Academy and Duke University respectively. During
the Vietnam War, he served as a pilot and unit historian in
southeast Asia, and later worked as a civilian historian for
the Department of the Air Force. He is the author of Gun
Control: A Historical Perspective, published by Candlestick
Publishing Company.