“Democracy” and the Language of the Founders

“A republic that moves too close to an oligarchy would require democratization.”

A useful starting point for a discussion of republican and democratic ideologies is defining the terms. The way the words “republican” and “republicanism” are used here is what is sometimes called “small r republicanism,” implying that it is not the ideology of a specific political party with the word in its name (such as the American or French Republican parties). Republicanism, understood in this way, has not had a fixed meaning throughout history, but there are some features that are generally associated with it. Some of these are the sovereignty of the people (as opposed to a sovereign monarch)  and an emphasis on liberty and equality. This will be discussed in more detail throughout the text. The words “democracy” and “democratic” are more complicated. When they first came into use during Classical Antiquity they exclusively referred to what we would now call “direct democracy,” a system in which the people directly exercise political power instead of electing representatives. In their contemporary usage, however, these terms refer to free and fair elections and a widespread distribution of suffrage. These conceptual changes are at the heart of the debate, so for now, it should suffice to say that these are terms with shifting definitions.

There might have been a time when anti-democratic institutions did not have such a strong impact. But it is clear that given the current makeup of the country, they place too much political power in a minority.

Every American general election, at least in recent times has brought with it some form of debate about the U.S. electoral system at the federal level. These conversations, of course, were understandably prominent following the 2016 presidential election because of the discrepancy between the popular vote and the electoral college vote totals. (Of course, these conversations also came up at plenty of other points: such as 2000 for example.) And this isn’t exclusive to presidential elections either, given that gerrymandering and the Senate also tend to give a disproportionate advantage to conservatives. Democrats in the United States—and the Left more broadly—point to factors such as these as structural and institutionalized anti-democratic measures that affect them. Now, whether one wants to argue for or against the existence of these practices, it is important to note that they are anti-democratic, by many definitions, because they violate the principle of “one person, one vote.” This is one of the few common features of the classical and contemporary acceptations of democracy, and it is the only arrangement consistent with a principle of political equality. Even the Supreme Court cited this concept in rulings regarding the relative size of congressional districts, while interpreting the implications of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The typical conservative response to these complaints is to observe that it is not a valid critique. The Founding Fathers, so their argument goes, did not envision a democracy, but a republic, and this justifies having anti-democratic measures preventing a majority from imposing their will on a minority. One of their go-to examples is the possibility for urban majorities to impose their beliefs on a rural minority, whose value systems city-dwellers struggle to understand. Another—with a more elitist bent—is that institutions such as the Senate, the Supreme Court and the Electoral College exist to prevent popular majorities from enacting radical change too quickly. Conservative publications such as The Federalist have put forward this argument as well recently. The Founders were certainly concerned about issues such as these. Many of them came from sparsely populated rural states, and many were wealthy landowners with much to lose at the hands of a radical majority. But it should not be forgotten that they were equally concerned with too much power in the hands of a small elite. And in contemporary America, it is the latter rather than the former that is arguably the bigger threat.