Dan Smoot, America is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. Full

A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC, NOT A DEMOCRACY

A democracy is a political system in which the people periodically, by majority vote at the polls, select their rulers. The rulers then have absolute power to make whatever laws they please, by majority vote among themselves. In a constitutional Republic, the people also, by majority vote at the polls, select rulers, who make laws by majority vote among themselves; but the rulers cannot make any laws they please, because the Constitution severely restricts their law-making power.

The ideal of a democracy is universal equality. The ideal of a constitutional Republic is individual liberty.

Subversion of Language

In this century, great strides have been made toward the goal of subverting our Republic and transforming it into a democracy. One tactic of the subverters is subversion of language. By calling the United States a democracy until people thoughtlessly accept and use the term, totalitarians have obscured the real meaning of our principles of government.

The writers of the Constitution were anxious to safeguard liberty against dictatorship (monarchy, they called it); but their chief anxiety was to protect the country against democracy.

Edmund Randolph, delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Virginia, said the "general object” of the Convention was to "provide a cure for the evils” which beset the country, claiming that "in tracing these evils to the origin,” every man had found them to be in the "turbulence and follies of democracy.” He urged the Convention to produce a means to "check . . . and to restrain, if possible, the fury of Democracy.”

Elbridge Gerry and Roger Sherman, delegates from Massachusetts and Connecticut, urged the Constitutional Convention to create a system which would eliminate "the evils we experience,” saying that those "evils . . . flow from the excess of democracy.”

Alexander Hamilton, delegate from New York, said: “We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty is neither found in despotism nor the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments .... if we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.”

John Adams (not a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, but one of the giants of the American revolutionary period) said: “ . . . democracy will envy all, contend with all, endeavor to pull down all; and when by chance it happens to get the upper hand for a short time, it will be revengeful, bloody, and cruel . . . .”

Speaking of "pure democracies” (in which the people, by majority vote, act as their own law makers, instead of electing representatives to make laws), James Madison said: “. . . such democracies have ever been . . . incompatible with personal security or the rights of property ...”

“A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises
the cure for which we are seeking.”