To Karen V. Bueno: The Republican Character of the United States of America

In today’s society, there exists a very wrong, and very dangerous, idea which is upheld by Democrats and Republicans alike, the idea, namely, that the United States of America is a democracy and that she needs to (a) remain a democracy under all circumstances and (b) play ‘the world police’ and help other nations become more democratic. It is these notions I would like to challenge in this short. In addition, I will give indications why the US could not have survived had she been founded as a democracy rather than as a republic.

Over the course of the past decades, numerous politicians from both parties have stressed the need to keep America democratic and to also help other countries accept democratic rule. Former President George W. Bush, for instance, seems convinced that the United States of America is a democracy. In a 2003 speech, he stated, “It is no accident that the rise of so many democracies took place in a time when the world’s most influential nation [the US] was itself a democracy.”¹ Indeed, Bush’s conviction that the US is a democracy seems to be one of his justifications for having engaged in major wars. His self-declared aim after the September 11 terrorist attacks, it appears, was to safeguard European democracies and make more Asian nations democratic. As he puts it in the same speech, “The United States made military and moral commitments in Europe and Asia, which protected free nations from aggression, and created the conditions in which new democracies could flourish.”² During her 2016 presidential campaign, in turn, Hillary Clinton argued that in potentially not accepting the results of the upcoming election, future President Donald J. Trump would pose “a direct threat to our democracy.”³ More recently, the January 6 United States Capitol attack has been evaluated by numerous newspapers as a danger to the allegedly democratic US. Writing for The New York Times, for instance, Peter Baker argued that “[t]he scenes in Washington would have once been unimaginable: [a] rampage through the citadel of American democracy.”⁴ In his 2024 State of the Union address, Joe Biden repeated this claim, stating:

In a literal sense, history is watching. History is watching—just like history watched three years ago on January 6th—when insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger to the throat of American democracy.

Many of you were here on that darkest of days. We all saw with our own eyes the insurrectionists were not patriots. They had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power, to overturn the will of the people.

January 6th lies about the 2020 election and the plots to steal the election posed a great—gravest threat to U.S. democracy since the Civil War.

But they failed. America stood—America stood strong and democracy prevailed. We must be honest: The threat to democracy must be [defeated].⁵

These claims are interesting given the fact that the United States of America is not a democracy but a constitutional republic. Etymologically speaking, the Greek word δημοκρατία (democracy) is a compound consisting of the lexemes δῆμος (people) and κράτος (rule). Consequently, a democracy is a social system under which the people collectively rule over individuals, thereby exploiting them for their own sake. In Ayn Rand’s words, “‘[D]emocratic’ in its original meaning [means] unlimited majority rule … [A democracy is] a social system in which one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose.”⁶

A republic, in marked contrast, is a social system which protects man’s inalienable rights. Rand exemplifies this point with regard to the US when stressing, “Ours was the first government based on and strictly limited by a written document—the Constitution—which specifically forbids it to violate individual rights or to act on whim.”⁷ In contrast to a democracy, under which the people can gradually enlarge the government by means of majority vote, a republic prevents government growth by means of its constitution. As Rand puts it, “[T]he Constitution, taken as a whole, is a fundamental restriction on the power of the government, whether in the legislative or in any other branch.”⁸

In a republic, people have the right to choose their representatives in free elections. The power of these representatives is severely limited, however. Neither one’s fellow citizens nor their representatives are in a position to override the limits established by the constitution. “Voting,” Rand stresses, “is merely a proper political device—within a strictly, constitutionally delimited sphere of action—for choosing the practical means of implementing a society’s basic principles.”⁹ Thus, the quintessential republican upholds that people have the right to vote because they are free. The average democrat wants to reverse this causal sequence, claiming that majority voting will increase the citizens’ liberty while ignoring that the mechanism of unlimited majority rule is incompatible with the idea of man’s inalienable rights. In Rand’s words, “The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system—and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters’ power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.”¹⁰

A democracy is a system of might. By means of majority vote, its citizens are able to infringe on their fellow citizens’ rights by expropriating, and even murdering,¹¹ them. A republic, in sharp contrast, is a system of right. By means of the constitution, its citizens are protected from the initiation of force.

Given these observations, it should be clear why the United States of America qualifies as a republic rather than as a democracy. By penning the American Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights, the American Founding Fathers declared, for the first time in history, that man’s life and property are not at the disposal of his fellow citizens (whatever their number). Indeed, in both their writings and their speeches, the Founding Fathers continually warned against the dangers of democracies. As James Madison, for instance, puts it in The Federalist Papers, “[D]emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”¹² Therefore, the US, the Founding Fathers reasoned, could only survive as a republic rather than as a democracy. “The United States,” they emphasize in the US Constitution, “shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.”¹³

After all, having intensively studied Aristotle, the Founding Fathers knew that autocracy and democracy are merely two sides of the same coin. In both systems, innocent citizens are deprived of their rights by another agent, be it the dictator or the mob. Only a republican form of government based on a watertight constitution, the Founding Fathers reasoned, could prevent the US from both the tyranny of the one and the tyranny of the many. As American philosopher Leonard Peikoff points out, “There are some contradictions in the Constitution; in essence, however, its purpose was to protect the individual from two potential tyrants: the government and the mob. The system was designed to thwart both the power lust of any aspiring dictator and any momentary, corrupt passion on the part of the general public.”¹⁴

The democratization of a nation, the Founding Fathers understood, goes hand in hand with the enslavement of its citizens. After all, through the mechanism of unlimited majority rule, citizens of a democracy are in a position to curtail individual liberty by simple majority vote. Thus, had she been founded as a democracy rather than as a republic, the US, the Founding Fathers concluded, could not have survived but would have inevitably disintegrated and collapsed. In Peikoff’s words:

The American system … was not a democracy, whether representative or direct, but a republic. … ‘Democracy’ means a system of unlimited majority rule; ‘unlimited’ means unrestricted by individual rights. Such an approach is not a form of freedom, but of collectivism. A ‘republic,’ by contrast, is a system restricted to the protection of rights. In a republic, majority rule applies only to some details, like the selection of certain personnel. Rights, however, remain an absolute; i.e., the principles governing the government are not subject to vote.¹⁵

1. George W. Bush, “Remarks on the Freedom Agenda: November 6, 2003,” Selected Speeches of George W. Bush: 2001-2008, 178. Accessible at https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/bushrecord/documents/Selected_Speeches_George_W_Bush.pdf. 

2. Bush, “Remarks,” 178.

3. For video material, cf. https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4821583/user-clip-hillary-clinton-accepting-results-election-direct-threat-democracy. Cf., too, her X post (@HillaryClinton) from Oct 24 2016: “Donald Trump refused to say that he’d respect the results of this election. That’s a direct threat to our democracy.”

4. Peter Baker, “A Mob and the Breach of Democracy: The Violent End of the Trump Era” (The New York Times: January 6, 2021).

5. Joe Biden, “2024 State of the Union Address,” accessible in video and text at https://www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2024.

6. Ayn Rand, “How to Read (and not to Write),” The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (New York: Meridian, 1990), 133-134.

7. Ayn Rand, “Censorship: Local and Express,” Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, [1982] 1984), 246.

8. Rand, “Censorship: Local and Express,” 252 [emphasis in the original].

9. Ayn Rand, “Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics?,” The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, 21 [emphasis in the original].

10. Ayn Rand, “The Lessons of Vietnam,” The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, 140 [emphasis in the original].

11. The classic example here is Socrates who was sentenced to death in democratic Athens. Note that Socrates did not initiate force against any of his fellow citizens. Rather, as Xenophon reports, Socrates was sentenced to death because he “was guilty of not believing in the Gods that the State believes in while introducing new divinities of another kind; furthermore, he was guilty of corrupting the young.” Cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia of Socrates, edited by Charles Anthon (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1861), I.1 [translation mine]. 

12. James Madison, “Federalist Paper No. 10: The Union as a Safeguard against Domestic Faction and Insurrection Continued,” The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter (New York: Signet, [1787] 2003), 76.

13. “The Constitution of the United States of America: Article IV, Section 4” (Carlisle: Applewood, [1787] 1995) [emphasis added].

14. Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Meridian, [1991] 1993), 368. 

15. Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, 368-369.