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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

In theory this is why we have a republic rather than a direct democracy. The people say what they want (e.g. less drug use) and the representatives do the hard work of figuring out how best to achieve that result (e.g. discovering that it's empirically more effective to treat it as a medical and social issue rather than a criminal issue, and enacting laws consistent with that result).

But then they don't and we're back to nefarious undertones.

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No, that's why you have representative democracy rather than direct democracy.

You have a republic rather than a monarchy. In order to establish its leadership, a republic can use representative democracy, direct democracy, fascism, dictatorship, whatever -- as long as it defines the power of the state as flowing from the entirety of its people, rather than from a subset of the population or by a divinity, it's a republic, end of. "Republic" is not a synonym of "representative democracy".

I wish I had a penny for every time I had to dispel this awful misconception in constitutional studies that only Americans seem to have.

Historically and in political science literature, "republic" IS synonymous with "representative democracy". In the 20th century autocratic/oligarchical/fascist states adopted "Republic" to sound democratic, and that use is becoming more common.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...

A state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.

http://ncsl.typepad.com/the_thicket/2011/09/republic-or-repr...

we regard the terms “republic” and “representative democracy” as being interchangeable, as does the political science literature.

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/163158?redirectedFrom=republic... a. A state in which power rests with the people or their representatives; spec. a state without a monarchy. Also: a government, or system of government, of such a state; a period of government of this type.The term is often (esp. in the 18th and 19th centuries) taken to imply a state with a democratic or representative constitution and without a hereditary nobility, but more recently it has also been used of autocratic or dictatorial states not ruled by a monarch. It is now chiefly used to denote any non-monarchical state headed by an elected or appointed president.

Note how all those definitions are not antithetical to direct democracy, which is the concept I was objecting to and something that only Americans keep repeating -- note how the only source you link with a whiff of support for such dichotomy is American and explicitly covers only "the American republic" (and basically says "yeah we know the terminology is imprecise, but whatever"...).

The word "republic" was coined by Romans, whose political system was a mixture of direct, representative, and oligarchic rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_elements_of_Roman_R... Were they not living in a "republic", despite inventing the name itself?

"Representative democracy" and "republic" have often been used as synonyms to indicate the absence of monarchical or divine intervention in the choice of leaders, not to exclude direct intervention by the people, which is something only Americans say it does not belong in a republic, for whatever reason.

But then it's not really the will of the people, which is what democracy is supposedly all about. I really hope people stop this silly charade of "we the people" and "self-governance" and "the government works for us" when really in a representative democracy you don't really have any of the above.

#Edit: grammar typo

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