I write to challenge a Letter to the Editor claiming our founders used the terms republic and democracy interchangeably. Quite the contrary. The authors of the Constitution did not equate republicanism with democracy. By the late 1780s, Americans generally were calling their governments democracies – a peculiar kind of democracy. Representation was the key concept of the emergent American political system. Only the American scheme, wrote Thomas Paine, was based “wholly on the system of representation,” and thus it was “the only real republic in character and practice, that now exists – representation ingrafted upon democracy.”
America is, Alexander Hamilton […]
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