Right-wingers who realize they benefit from the anti-democratic features of our Constitution are fond of saying that America is a republic, not a democracy. Is that true? And is the question even meaningful?
Let’s take a brief stroll through American history:
- The Founding Fathers were very progressive for their day, when compared with political leaders in Europe, but they were not democrats.
- But by 1830 or so, due to the easy availability of real property and ideological trends, virtually every white American man had the vote.
- The right was extended to blacks in the Fifteenth Amendment.
- Women won the right to vote in the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
- The age limit on voting was lowered to 18 in the Twenty-sixth Amendment in 1971.
The bottom line here is that the Founding Fathers’ views of democracy, at least as they apply to voting rights, are not relevant to a contemporary discussion of our political system, and have not been so for many years. Like it or not, America is both a democracy and a republic.
Of course, there are other anti-democratic features in the Constitution, most of which have the support of the left as well as the right. I will discuss these in a future post.