I hadn’t seen anyone attempt to make this fatuous argument in quite some time, but a politically illiterate individual on Threads pulled out the old, “America is not a Democracy, it is a Constitutional Republic,” nonsense just the other day.

If that dumbshit statement isn’t one of the surest pieces of evidence that education is important (and that our educational system is failing), I don’t know what is. Not to point fingers or anything, but I’ve only ever seen former Tea Party and current MAGA folks tossing this gem out there. You’re free to interpret that as you will. I know what I suspect is behind that particularly ignorant claim arising from one specific cross-section of the American Political Spectrum.

I know the people who say things like that like to believe it makes them sound intellectual in some capacity. I know they think it’s some sort of “Get Out of Argument Free” card that they can toss into a discussion when things aren’t going the way they want. Sadly (for them), all it does is clearly display that the person making the statement understands nothing about either a Republic or a Democracy…and probably shouldn’t be trusted as an authority on any matters of government.

This is why it sounds so stupid to anyone with a passing familiarity with political theory. It’s the equivalent of saying, “Brutus isn’t a dog, he’s a German Shepherd.”

A Republic is a subset of the Democratic form of Government, a Representative Democracy as opposed to a Direct Democracy (where everyone would be free and encouraged to weigh in on every matter and every piece of legislation), which would be tedious as Hell! Instead, a Democratic process determines Representatives who then act on behalf of the bloc that voted for them.

I’m tempted to ask if the person making that statement is stupid or simply ill-informed…but they’re not mutually exclusive…sort of like a Democracy and a Republic.

I suppose one might say, “He’s not ill-informed, he’s stupid,” because while not all ill-informed people are stupid, all stupid people are certainly ill-informed.