> America isn't nor was it ever a democracy but a republic.

Contra:

> Dependent on a minority of the population to hold national power, Republicans such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah have taken to reminding the public that “we’re not a democracy.” It is quaint that so many Republicans, embracing a president who routinely tramples constitutional norms, have suddenly found their voice in pointing out that, formally, the country is a republic. There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous. The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule.

> The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called “pure” democracy and defended the American experiment as “wholly republican.” To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic, was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. It misses, too, how we understand the idea of democracy today.

> When founding thinkers such as James Madison spoke of democracy, they were usually referring to direct democracy, what Madison frequently labeled “pure” democracy. Madison made the distinction between a republic and a direct democracy exquisitely clear in “Federalist No. 14”: “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.” […]

* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/yes-consti...

* https://archive.ph/FbuL5

> In short, what we call “representative democracy” today — a system of government where people elect leaders to make policy — is what the founders called a “republic.” Their attacks on “democracy” in the Athenian sense does not mean that America is not a democracy in the contemporary sense.

* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21507713/mike-lee-de...

The use of the term/idea has also been 'weaponized' for a number of decades, and modern usage is just a rehashing:

> Republicans have long proclaimed that “we are not a democracy.” In the 1960s, the distinction became particularly linked with the John Birch Society, an anti-Communist group associated with a rising populist right. The idea offered a historical righteousness for the group’s opposition to desegregation and multi-racial democracy. “For us baby-boomers,” Ed Kilgore noted in New York Magazine in 2019, “the Birchers’ use of the term republic to justify all sorts of artificial restraints on popular majorities rings familiar.”

> As Jamelle Bouie has written for the New York Times, the phrase invokes the idea that the Founders designed our system of government to combat the tyranny of the majority—but it misreads the substance of their arguments and becomes instead an argument for minority rule. “The point of the slogan isn’t to describe who we are but to claim and co-opt the founding for right-wing politics,” Bouie writes, “to naturalize political inequality and make it the proper order of things.”

[…]

> Implicit in the “we are not a democracy” cant is the notion that it doesn’t matter that a majority of Americans disagree with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, or that five of the Supreme Court justices who made that decision were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. Instead of “the United States is not a democracy,” Republicans should just say what they mean: “The United States should be governed by minority rule.”

* https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2022/11/democracy-repu...