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An Oligarchy En Route to Anocracy. Dictatorship Could Be the End Point.
About a month ago, while knocking on voters’ doors to remind them to vote in the November election and informing them about candidates and ballot initiatives, I engaged in a brief conversation with a registered Democrat in his early eighties who proffered a common republican talking point: “We are not a democracy; we are a republic.”
He then insisted that democracy can exist in a dictatorship.
“Look at Russia,” he stated. “They have elections there, right?”
It took everything I had to hold back the historian in me clawing at the cage to be let out. I didn’t want to alienate him; I wanted him to vote. I wasn’t going to change his mind anyway. So I just left him some candidate literature, thanked him for his time and for voting, and bid him good day.
In a roundabout way he was correct.
We are a republic. But we are also a democracy (at least for the time being).
Our founders were cognizant of both terms, and often used them interchangeably, but they were wary about each’s strict applicably in the new governmental structure they were creating.
“Father of the Constitution,” James Madison, our country’s fourth president, defined “democracy” as a form of government where “the…
