There's a complaint we get pretty often around here, that our tagline contains the word "democracy," but the United States is *actually* a republic. So...do we need to make a change? We dig into that question and a whole lot more on this episode.
Guests:
Juliet Hooker: Royce Professor, Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University
Paul Frymer: Professor of Politics, Princeton University
Transcript:
Washington Journal Archive: And that's New Hampshire Public Radio's Civic 101 podcast. And these are its co-hosts and producers, Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice. Thank you so much for being with us here this morning.
Hannah McCarthy: It's a pleasure to be here, Jesse. Thank you.
Nick Capodice: You remember this?
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, yeah, I remember this.
Nick Capodice: You want to just tell everyone real quick what it was?
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, sure. In November of 2021, Nick and I were on Washington Journal on C-SPAN, talking about our show. And I remember very clearly, Nick, when they opened the phone lines.
Washington Journal Archive: Let's talk to James, who's calling from Port Angeles, Washington. James, good morning.
Washington Journal Archive: Good morning, Jesse. Are you guys there?
Washington Journal Archive: We're here. Go ahead, James.
Washington Journal Archive: Yeah. Being bipartisan, you guys from New Hampshire. How do you keep your own opinions to yourselves on your show? I know you're just working on..
Nick Capodice: And I want to play one caller's specific beef with us, and he's not alone.
Washington Journal Archive: Let's talk to Murph, who's calling from Germantown, Tennessee. Murph, good morning.
Washington Journal Archive: Thank you for taking this call. I have a bone to pick with your two guests. I taught American government and civics for 22 years in an American public school classroom in Tennessee. The United States of America is not a democracy. It never has been. Never will be. It is a republic. And we pass laws and govern ourselves through our elected representatives and a rule of law. Do you want to investigate a democracy? I suggest you look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the former Soviet Union who allowed people to vote, but they only had one choice. I find your efforts outstanding because of the ignorance of the average American citizen and truly wish you well in this endeavor. But I challenge you to scour the Federalist Papers. Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, to find the word democracy anywhere. Thank you so very much. And you too. Take care. Have a great Thanksgiving and a merry Christmas.
Washington Journal Archive: Who wants to take that on?
Nick Capodice: If you're listening to Civics 101 I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And today in our podcast refresher course on the basics of how our democracy works, we're interrogating those exact words. Are we wrong to refer to the US as a democracy? What did the framers of our Constitution intend for us to be? And while we're at it, how democratic are we anyways?
Juliet Hooker: You know, the word democracy, of course, goes back to ancient Greece and to the city states that, you know, that first pioneered this form of politics.
Nick Capodice: This is Juliet Hooker.
Juliet Hooker: I'm the Royce professor, teaching excellence in political science at Brown University.
Hannah McCarthy: Now, when Juliet is talking about ancient Greece, is she referring to Athens, to Athenian democracy?
Nick Capodice: Yes, she is. This is the very first known democracy in human history.
Juliet Hooker: In political theory and political science, we understand democracy as a form of government in which the people have the authority to rule, to deliberate and make decisions about policy, and they can do so directly. This is called direct democracy, right? In the Athenian city states, they were small enough that it was direct.
Nick Capodice: The word democracy comes from demos, meaning people and kratos, meaning power men who had undergone mandatory military training were obliged to participate in the assembly in Athens, where elected officials proposed laws and everybody voted by a show of hands.
Hannah McCarthy: Obliged, as in they had to vote.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, they had to. If they didn't, they could be fined and sometimes marked with red paint. And there was a whole set of rules about who could be one of those elected officials who propose all the laws in the first place, which is fascinating, but I can't get into it all here. I do need to throw in some quick fun etymology, though, when they would vote on whether or not to expel someone who is dangerous to the country, they'd use broken pieces of pottery called ostrakon to cast their ballot. And that is where we get the word ostracize.
Hannah McCarthy: They actually knew that, Believe it or not.
Nick Capodice: I had a feeling you would.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. So I do want to get to America and its founding, but there is a bit of a problem here in Athens. We think about this being an example of pure democracy, direct democracy. But it was only men who could vote.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. Absolutely. We are not including women when we talk about this democracy, we are not including enslaved Greeks. Roughly, only about 30% of the Athenian population could participate in the democratic process. So that's our starting point. And about 2000 years later, 55 men were debating how to design the system we use in the US today.
Juliet Hooker: Certainly at the time of the founding, I think there has become something that people bat about in contemporary debates. The word that people often use was republic, because at that time the issue was gaining independence. The idea was to be not to be part of this monarchical empire anymore, but to be a republic. But it is also the case, I think there's certainly a question about that. Scholars of American political development have thought about whether the extent to which, for example, the founders were committed to a vision of, let's say, equal democracy.
Nick Capodice: And like in Athens, we weren't a truly inclusive democracy.
Juliet Hooker: It was restricted, right? It didn't apply to everyone, primarily in terms of who could participate fully as a citizen to propertied white men. So women were excluded, certainly until after the Civil War and emancipation and the amendments granting citizenship to black men.
Hannah McCarthy: Black people were excluded.
Juliet Hooker: Indigenous people also as a matter of law. Up until the 1960s, the US was not a full democracy because it was not really possible for African Americans to participate in the South. So even just as a matter of just the basic functioning of democracy up to then, what is it now? 60 years ago, the US was not a full democracy.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, this is very important. There's sort of a sliding scale of democracy in America. We've constantly shifted. Who is allowed to participate in the political process?
Nick Capodice: Yes, as Juliet said, until 1790 it was only white men who owned property who could vote. And we think about the big laws or amendments that changed then like the 15th and the 19th Amendment or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But throughout history, there were myriad laws that states passed with racial, religious, or gender restrictions explicitly prohibiting groups of Americans from voting.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, we have talked about the history of the word democracy. Let's talk about the other one that Juliet mentioned, the Republic.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. So we're swapping out Hermes for Mercury and Poseidon for Neptune because we're going from Greece to Rome.
Hannah McCarthy: Is that your go-to Roman music bed? Yep. It's Roman all over the place.
Nick Capodice: Race publica a system for the public. Now, at first blush, Hannah, the Roman Republic looks a lot like us. There's a Democratic forum and there's a Senate and officials representing the people, not the people themselves, make all the decisions. But the senators who wrote and passed all the laws were not elected. They were from the richest, most aristocratic families in Rome. And at the very top were two consuls, which the Senate elected.
Hannah McCarthy: Now, if the Senate and the councils did all of the law passing, what was the purpose of the forum?
Nick Capodice: Well, the forum didn't have a lot of power. It was a place for speeches and elections of lower-level offices. But honestly, the appointed Senate, they ran the whole thing.
Hannah McCarthy: So the forum was a placation?
Juliet Hooker: Yeah. It's like go talk about it in the forum. And we the Senate who weren't even elected, we'll think about it real hard.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, So we in America are a little like the Athenian democracy and a little like the Roman Republic. Nick which of those words, democracy or republic represents us better?
Nick Capodice: I will let you know the answer to this, Hannah in my opinion, but more importantly, the opinion of the framers and of our guests on the show right after this break. But first, if you want to know more about consuls, censors, preachers, patricians and plebeians, that's the stuff that we put in our biweekly newsletter, Extra Credit. Check it out at our website, civics101podcast.org.
Hannah McCarthy: We're back. We're challenging our show's tagline today on Civics 101, where we refer to ourselves as a democracy. Now, Nick, at the top of the show, you played a clip from a former civics teacher who asked us to scour the texts of the framers to find the word democracy. Did you do that?
Nick Capodice: I did, and I did. First off, though, you know that famous exchange that may or may not have happened between Elizabeth Powell and Benjamin Franklin?
Hannah McCarthy: Is this the one where she said, well, doctor, what have we got? Or a republic or a monarchy?
Archive: Greetings from Philadelphia. My name is Franklin, Benjamin Franklin. As I was coming out of the building one day, a woman said to me, Sir, what have you given us?
Archive: And I looked at her and I said, Madam, we have.
Archive: Given you a republic if you can keep it.
Nick Capodice: And it's likely that he said that or something to that effect, because it appears in the notes of James McHenry from the Constitutional Convention. However, another quote attributed to him is, quote, "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for lunch." There is no evidence whatsoever that Franklin said that or anything like that. The first use of that quote that I could find was from 1990. And also, by the way, people didn't use the word "lunch" until the 19th century. But back to the main point, did early political minds refer to democracy? If I do scour the founding documents for that word, will I find it? Yes. Yes, Hannah, They most certainly did.
Hannah McCarthy: Who did?
Nick Capodice: Well, here we go. In Federalist 14, James Madison used the word democracy five times just in that essay alone. Now, to be fair, he was using the word to explain how the Democratic Republic is different from a, quote unquote, pure democracy. He said that while direct democracy, the people making all the decisions can be used in a small area. It cannot be used for a whole nation. John Adams used the expression representative democracy to describe our system. So too did Thomas Jefferson in 1815. And then we have two early, early Supreme Court justices. First, James Wilson, who helped write the Constitution. He said that there are three forms of government, quote, monarchical aristocratic rule and democratic rule, end quote. And later, Judge John Marshall.
Hannah McCarthy: The John Marshall.
Nick Capodice: The man himself, Justice Marshall, expounded on the maxims of democracy without ever even using the qualifier of representative before it. And I've been talking a lot about the Constitution here, Hannah, but we also have to mention that when we were getting started as a nation before the Constitutional Convention, we were even a little bit more democratic.
Juliet Hooker: You know, it is thought that the Articles of Confederation were more "small d" democracy.
Nick Capodice: This is Paul Frymer. He's a professor of politics at Princeton University.
Paul Frymer: It was focused a little more populist, rooted in local governments. The 1780s were seen as a disaster, you know, and the various ways in which farmers and other groups avoided paying back debts and the like. It was thought to be generally chaotic. The government felt it needed more stability. And when you read something like Federalist Ten by James Madison, the tyranny of the majority and the belief that we need checks and balances, that was all to check democracy, to check broader populism, to put governance more in the hands of elites. That's pretty clear. They aren't all in agreement on that. But certainly the overall tone of the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, skews in that direction.
Hannah McCarthy: Just a fast refresher here. The Articles of Confederation was the name of our first governing document. It basically outlined 13 different countries, a.k.a. the colonies, with a very loose bond, binding them together.
Nick Capodice: Right. A firm league of friendship, almost no federal government, no chief executive, and Hannah, they were a disaster. Rewriting the articles was the initial goal of the Constitutional Convention.
Hannah McCarthy: And this goes back to the notion of a sliding scale of democracy, doesn't it? We started a little more democratic, and then we reined in the will of the people a little bit when we ratified the Constitution. Does Paul think that right now we can refer to America as a democracy?
Paul Frymer: Yeah, I think we aspire to be a democracy. That's important. We have enough procedures that require a certain form of democracy. Electoral College aside, the presidential election is largely a majority vote that's meaningful. Most of our elections are majority elections. And we have procedures, you know, civil liberties, due process. These are all important rights of democracy and due process that are really critical. One, that you can't just be thrown in jail without without trial or some cause. Again, you can we have political prisoners. We have huge incarceration rates. We can raise qualifications on all this. But there's an aspiration to a democracy. And I think there's enough procedures that we qualify to be a democracy.
Hannah McCarthy: I just want to pivot here. I'm so curious. How do we appear in the eyes of others, like people from other countries? Do others refer to the United States as a democracy?
Nick Capodice: They do indeed. We are on the list.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, I know that list.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. No discussion of democratic principles would be possible without it. The Democracy Index. This is courtesy of the Economist Intelligence Unit. This index comes out every year. What it does is it ranks every country in the world on its democracy. It uses 60 indicators to measure where a country stands on the scale from full democracy all the way down to authoritarian regime. Paul told me that these indices aren't perfect. They came out after the Cold War. They are quite capitalist-driven, but people pay attention to them. And the most recent index at the time of this recording is from 2021.
Hannah McCarthy: How well did we do on that most recent one?
Nick Capodice: Not that well. The US ranked 26th in the world when it comes to democracy and we are in the category of, quote, flawed democracy. 31% of the world's countries are in that group.
Hannah McCarthy: Who is number one?
Nick Capodice: Norway, New Zealand and Finland. It was a three-way tie with a perfect ten.
Hannah McCarthy: And then last place.
Nick Capodice: Afghanistan.
Hannah McCarthy: Now 26th place for a country that regularly champions itself as being the ultimate democracy. Right. That's kind of shabby. I mean, have we done better in the past?
Nick Capodice: We have. We are at a 7.85 out of ten now. In 2006, we were at 8.6, six out of ten. And this brings me to something Paul mentioned, a recent trend of people saying that we are becoming less democratic now than we were hundreds of years ago.
Paul Frymer: I am often annoyed by some of the current discourse that the United States is less of a democracy today than we were. I don't know. I think since they first started doing these index tests, going back to the 1840s, and my response to that is that that's completely nonsense. What do we mean by a democracy? Obviously, we had slavery, we had Jim Crow, we had allowance of racial discrimination, legal, racial, racial discrimination until 1964 with the Civil Rights Act, our political party. So separating from that, our political parties are hardly as democratic as they are today. 19th, early 20th century, you had party ballots where you received the ballot. It wasn't private. You had to vote for that party. A lot of times the people stared at you when you requested a ballot. Parties were corrupt. We talk about elections, the election outcomes. We have in history lots of examples of corruption. That's not to say we're a great democracy now, but we really want to inquire what we mean. When have we ever really been a democracy? Maybe that would be the question I'd ask.
Nick Capodice: If we're talking about democracy now in America, one of the factors we've got to take into account is the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed voting laws and practices that discriminated against voters, Black voters in particular, was frankly gutted in 2013 and the Supreme Court decision and Shelby v Holder.
Archive: And at least for now, Jake, the bottom line is that these southern states, largely southern states that had these special requirements that the federal government imposed in that 1965 Voting Rights Act, they are no longer going to have to deal with that, at least for the time being, unless Congress takes special action. And as I said, I don't anticipate that special.
Nick Capodice: This was the Supreme Court ruling that places with a history of discrimination no longer need clearance from the federal government to change voting laws. And if you want to know more about it, we did a whole episode on the current state of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes.
Hannah McCarthy: All right, Nick. So where does that leave us? How does our tagline fair? Are we a democracy?
Nick Capodice: Well, this answer is a two-parter. And in the first part, I want to say that I feel that it is fair to refer to the United States as a republic, and not because it was written into the Pledge of Allegiance over 100 years after the Constitution was ratified that somebody put in there and to the republic for which it stands. But I think it's fair because the U.S. is a republic. We elect people to write and pass laws. We don't do it ourselves all the time. And part two, it is absolutely fair to refer to the United States as a democracy. It's a representative democracy. We vote. We choose those officials, unlike ancient Rome, and we even have vestiges of that pure democracy we talked about earlier. Lots of states have initiatives, ballot measures where the people can propose laws and vote on them. And from a very personal standpoint, I think that this "don't call us a democracy" rhetoric is nonsensical. It's meaningless. I read a quote about this the other day where someone said it's like they're toddlers screaming, "the ball isn't green, it's round." We are a republic. We are a democracy. We've done better and we've done worse. But what's most important to me is something Juliet Hooker said when I asked her what to do when we feel that democracy is under threat.
Juliet Hooker: I think maybe it's this is not to minimize the current threats to democracy, which are very grave, but to say maybe it would be helpful if we recognize that democracy has always been under threat because democracy isn't this thing that you achieve and then you're perfectly democratic and there's no work left to do. It's an ideal you're always trying to put into practice. It's a way of living in concert with others. Also moving beyond a notion that there are only two sides to any issue and recognizing that there are multiple perspectives. And how do we reframe political and policy debate so that that is recognized and thinking about why people have been disillusioned with democracy and why some people are also invested in it. So what are the sources of democratic faith? And also why are the thinkers, movements, activists who also can test democracy? What are the things that it hasn't done well that lead people to despair?
Nick Capodice: That is it for today on Civics 101, the podcast refresher course on the basics of how our democracy works. Murph, I hope you hear this. Write us with your thoughts. This episode is created by me. Nick Capodice with you. Hannah McCarthy.
Hannah McCarthy: Thank you. Thank you. Our staff includes Jackie Fulton. Christina Phillips is our senior producer and Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer.
Nick Capodice: Music In this episode by Asura The Grand Affair. Ryan Kilkenny. Gabriel Lewis Vanilla. Howard Harper. Barnes IO, Blue Bluedot Sessions, Divided, Cushy Max Hansen, and the inimitable Chris Zabriskie.
Hannah McCarthy: Civics 101 is a production of NHPR - New Hampshire Public Radio.
Nick Capodice: OUTTAKE: He said that there are three forms of government, quote, monarchical. Monarchical, monarchical, aristocratic, aristocratic all. Quote monarchical, aristocratic and democratically.