Reply #22: It's what I was taught in HS.....

[DeSwiss]

...in undergrad, and in graduate school. Of course I don't think they teach much about government or civics in HS anymore like they did in my day. But the definition as I use it and as is typically used (I thought), refers to a government which not headed by a monarch and has some form of representative government. It was not a reference having to do with left or right-wing parties, ideologies or philosophies per se. If anything most would say it's in the center, politically - with totalitarianism at one extreme and anarchy at the other.

But democracies have been notoriously unfair to minorities and resulting in extreme swings back and forth when majority rules. At least as in the closest form of "direct-democracy" that we can document, as was attempted by the Greeks during the classical period in the ancient past. It was partly responsible for their undoing, by weakening them militarily and politically for later conquest by the Romans as the Greek city-states has exhausted themselves fighting each other. Majority rule sounds good on paper, but republics rule by laws in order to be fair to everyone, not just the one who can get the most votes.

Neither did we have direct-democracy with the pre-cursors to the Constitution: the Articles of Confederation. In the U.S.'s own early attempts at organization, their only provisions for franchised citizenship applied to white - male - landowners. One was considered a U.S. citizen if they were also citizens of one of the 13 original colonies at the time of the U.S.'s declared independence from Great Britain. And yet at the same time they enslaved around 4 million people. And all women in the U.S were disenfranchised for 144 years from the beginning of independence. So democracy isn't always a better way, if you don't already have power when it begins or if you are in a minority.

Here's the Wiki though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republics#United_States">United States
Main article: Republicanism in the United States

A distinct set of definitions for the word republic evolved in the United States. In common parlance a republic is a state that does not practice direct democracy but rather has a government indirectly controlled by the people. In the rest of the world this is known as representative democracy. This understanding of the term was originally developed by James Madison, and notably employed in Federalist Paper No. 10. This meaning was widely adopted early in the history of the United States, including in Noah Webster's dictionary of 1828. It was a novel meaning to the term, representative democracy was not an idea mentioned by Machiavelli and did not exist in the classical republics.<48>

The term republic does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, but does appear in Article IV of the Constitution which "guarantee(s) to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government." What exactly the writers of the constitution felt this should mean is uncertain. The Supreme Court, in Luther v. Borden (1849), declared that the definition of republic was a "political question" in which it would not intervene. In two later cases, it did establish a basic definition. In United States v. Cruikshank (1875), the court ruled that the "equal rights of citizens" were inherent to the idea of republic. The opinion of the court from In re Duncan<49> held that the "right of the people to choose their government" is also part of the definition.

Beyond these basic definitions the word republic has a number of other connotations. W. Paul Adams observes that republic is most often used in the United States as a synonym for state or government, but with more positive connotations than either of those terms.<50> Republicanism is often referred to as the founding ideology of the United States. Traditionally scholars believed this American republicanism was a derivation of the liberal ideologies of John Locke and others developed in Europe.

The political philosophy of republicanism initiated by Machiavelli was thought to have had little impact on the founders of the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s a revisionist school lead by the likes of Bernard Bailyn began to argue that republicanism was just as or even more important than liberalism in the creation of the United States.<51> This issue is still much disputed and scholars like Kramnick completely reject this view.<52>

- The one thing that I'll definitely agree about, is that whatever it is that thing we've got is called, the Repukes messed it up and made it worse than it was. But then in my experience, they pretty much always have. It's the one thing that they've always done best......