This pops up every now and then and is complete bullshit. A republic is a system of government with a parliament and an elected head of state. Being a republic and being a democracy are completely unrelated. There are republics that are oligarchies, dictatorships, or democracies. Similarly, there are monarchies that are oligarchies, dictatorships, or democracies.
You can discuss about legitimacy and the fact that the US is a federation of states instead of a government of citizens, but “it’s a republic not a democracy” is stupid. Using it as a way of justifying blatant undemocratic aspects of the way the US work is doubly so.
It’s a bit blurred because of its single-party nature, but it has all of the attributes of a republic.
For all intents and purposes it is republic. After all republic is quite meaningless term, specially when we consider some constitutional monarchies or dictatorial leaders that don't have hereditary power.
It's a fuzzy term. As usual, not everything falls nicely in neat little boxes.
In constitutional monarchies, the monarch is still associated with "the crown" and is personally an integral part of the State, and it is almost always hereditary. Sweden and the UK are unarguably monarchies with some democratic legitimacy. I was going to write "always", but actually I'd be curious to know if there is an example of non-hereditary constitutional monarchy nowadays.
I would think that non-hereditary dictatorships tend to be republics, even if the parliament plays a purely nominal role (Azerbaijan, Russia, several African republics, etc), or just military dictatorship, doing away with any pretence and not bothering with a parliament and rigged elections (lots of them have been around; these days Myanmar is a good example). North Korea is also interesting, being a hereditary republican dictatorship.
They are ALL democracies, and I'm unaware of a single country on the planet that is a pure democracy. All are representative in some way.
This bizarre "not a democracy" (for the oldest ongoing democracy) is not based in reality at all, but someone read it somewhere and just mindlessly repeats it.
> It's easy to win elections when you promise free healthcare, free education, free childcare,... The average person will vote in their immediate interest and not worry about the big picture
In reality the "average person" votes against their own interest -- both short and long term -- at virtually every turn.
I feel like I've been trolled.
At least on paper.
The queen has no more control over the country than a hood ornament has over the direction of a car.
That's what taxes are supposed to be for. What's the different if I pay 10k a year to an insurance company or the government for my family to have affordable access to healthcare? With the current system, I'm not even getting that, my entire family has never exceeded our crazy high deductibles. We have some form of control over who gets to run our government programs, no matter how small that form of control is, it's better than the zero control we have over the practices of private companies or the terrible choices private companies make about what insurance we get to even have in the first place.
Private healthcare in the US has a lot of government intervention and regulation that makes it a farce.
“One person, one vote” might have been radical 300 years ago, but it really should not be controversial in the 21st century.
The only way I can agree on pure majority vote is that you need to qualify for it, e.g. only those who contributed to the society(taxpayers,social works, housewives raising kids,etc) can vote(disabled can vote no matter what). Voting right should be earned.
The problem you run into is that someone has to define how it should be earned. Several criteria have been tried (wealth, tax paid, military service, etc), and all of them have been found inadequate in one or several respects.
Several revolutions have been fought over this. Still, assuming that a perfect criterion would exist, what would be yours?
The dictionary definition I pulled up quickly is:
1. Employment within a governmental system
2. A service performed for the benefit of the public
The Germans are on their second or third (depending on how you count... I don't consider DDR to have been a real republic). The first one ended...badly.
The United States is still on its first republic. If it weren't for some degree of independence for the individual states the United States would never have been formed in the first place, and, if it had been, there would likely have been many civil wars, not just one.
It's almost like a bunch of highly educated and intelligent individuals spent several years studying the failure modes of previous republics and then designing a system that would be robust against those failure modes.
Just pick a criteria on which to judge a societal system and you'll find the us near the middle bottom of the pack.
It is true that some compromises were needed because of its federalist character. In this it is much closer to Germany than to France.
> It's almost like a bunch of highly educated and intelligent individuals spent several years studying the failure modes of previous republics and then designing a system that would be robust against those failure modes.
I am not really disagreeing with you here, but what makes you think that this was not the case in other countries? Were there no highly educated and intelligent people in Europe for 2 centuries?
There was a lot of cross-pollination between France and the US at the time of the revolution, several people were involved in both. The American constitution is built on enlightenment values that were quite widely shared and Europe was not short in political thinkers either. A lot of them also benefitted from the American example.
What ended most of the French republics were coups d’états and wars. As in “the enemy is a 2 hours drive away from the capital”, not “let’s bomb another country on the other side of the world”. It’s not because of its immutable constitution that these things did not happen in the US.
In short, I think smugness is unwarranted, and the US is not immune to coups d’états, even if its geography precludes almost any wartime occupation. Also, philosophers in the 18th century were not super-human. Their work is not perfect. The lack of evolution leads to fossilisation and a shift of power towards the Supreme Court. This is a serious threat to the separation of powers, and should be taken seriously.
There are other failure modes that have been made clear in the last 2 centuries, Americans would be wise not to dismiss them and learn from others, as other learnt from them.
Their mistake was generally adding Rousseau and Marx into the mix, rather than stopping with Locke.
> As in “the enemy is a 2 hours drive away from the capital”, not “let’s bomb another country on the other side of the world”. It’s not because of its immutable constitution that these things did not happen in the US.
Err... before Canada became quasi-independent, the United States had a very long border with the British Empire, which was (in)famous for its penchant for grabbing territory. They even burned Washington DC at one point.
The story was the same with Mexico. In the early years of the United States, Mexico was part of the Spanish Empire, another entity noted for wars of conquest on the grand scale. And yes, after Mexican independence, the United States launched a war of conquest of its own across that border. But it could have gone the other way in the early days.
The French (another colonial power) also had massive holdings in North America.
Sorry, the "United States didn't have any war-like neighbors" theory doesn't hold.