Of course, none of this to say that the founders’ idea of who constituted “the people” - mainly white men - didn’t undermine actual popular rule. "There’s really no difference, in the present, between a 'republic' and a 'democracy': Both connote systems of representation in which sovereignty and authority derive from the public at large," wrote New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie in 2019 when dismantling a previous instance of the republic-not-a-democracy narrative.Īs Thomas argued in an essay in The Atlantic, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton used the word “democracy” to refer to just governance under their republican vision, and in the 19th century Abraham Lincoln used the terms “democracy” and “constitutional republic” interchangeably. But the narrative involves a rhetorical sleight of hand to cloak an extremist agenda of minority rule in the guise of fulfilling what the founders wanted.Īs scholar George Thomas of Claremont McKenna College has pointed out, the founding generation did describe the American experiment as a republic - a form of government in which a state is ruled by representatives of the citizen body - but didn’t see it at odds with or mutually exclusive from democracy. is a republic instead of a democracy is becoming a common mantra. In other words, in the heart of one of the more energetic hotbeds of Trumpist Republican activity in the country, the claim that the U.S. We’re a republic.” At a gathering in Mesa that I attended in July, held by the conservative group United Patriots AZ, the evening’s host, Jeffrey Crane, asked the audience, “Are we a democracy?” They responded loudly: “Nooooo! Republic!” “By the way,” Charlie Kirk made a point of saying at the fund-raiser in Goodyear, “we don’t have a democracy.
That’s not us.”Īnd in rallies and meetings across Arizona during this campaign season, Draper found “proactive denigration” of democracy on the right through the "the U.S. Nowhere in the Constitution does it use the word ‘democracy.’ When I hear the word ‘democracy,’ I think of the democracy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Draper quotes Selina Bliss, a precinct committeewoman who made an unsuccessful bid for a state House seat, saying at a meeting: “We are a constitutional republic. “is a republic, not a democracy.” This is a reactionary Republican narrative that has surfaced from time to time in the past but it seems that something more consistent is congealing in Arizona. One striking way the anti-democracy rhetoric is showing up is through the claim among activists that the U.S. Draper says he’s observed among Arizona Republican politicians and activists in the past year a “hostility not just to democratic principles, but, increasingly, to the word ‘democracy’ itself,” which is “distinct from anything I have encountered in over two decades of covering conservative politics.” But something idiosyncratically toxic seems to be emerging in the state's conservative scene.
State legislators have fixated on challenging the election system, and Trump-backed candidates have dominated the state’s recent Republican primaries. These Republicans think they’re defending American traditions of governance, but they’re not in touch with the history they believe they’re championing, and they’re catalyzing more virulent anti-democratic extremism on the right.Įven though Arizona is only a light red state in terms of voting behavior, the state’s Republican Party has been notably radicalized by Trump and his 2020 disinformation agenda. But a disturbing new report by Robert Draper in The New York Times Magazine shows how Arizona Republicans are increasingly committed to waging a war on the idea of democracy itself, in part through a bid to call the U.S. have been undermining democracy by fabricating claims of voter fraud and passing laws to make it harder to vote.
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