It's just my personal pet peeve, because 99% of the time there is no functional difference between a republic and democracy and people say there is mostly as a justification to prevent people from participating. Carry on, good sir.
Of course words have definitions. That's why it's dumb to claim shooting or locking them in a cage someone is actually nonviolent, and also silly to claim we don't live in a democracy because we live in a republic.
Sam:
Democracy and Republic are not synonyms. They are not almost synonyms. They are two different things.
A democracy focuses on people making the laws. The greater percentage of the people who vote, the more democratic a democracy is. The classical Athenian democracy is not one we would consider very democratic at all, as only a small minority of people were able to vote. Voter turnout was often high, though.
A monarchy could be a democracy. Great Britain has one.
A republic focuses on representatives of the people making the laws for them. (And there not being a monarch.) It is not necessary (in a republic) that the people directly elect those representatives. The representatives could be chosen in a number of ways. The state could put the office up for bid, and the highest bidder would win. (A nice addendum would be that he would have to help fund the government with his personal wealth.) They could be chosen by lot, or, today, by random generation of SSANs. They could be chosen by the leaders of the polity one echelon below the offices in question. They could be chosen by election, with the lowest vote-getters "winning."
You could have a republic that was very democratic or you could have one that is not recognizably democratic at all.
We are a republic that is quite democratic. ("A democracy in a republic," as I remember from some 6th-grade patriotic celebration.) Some would like it to be more democratic. Others, not so much.
I think that we would not go wrong if we did not equate "democratic" and "good." (Just as I think we would not go wrong if we did not equate "Republican" or "Democrat" with "good.") Democracies have produced some pretty bad results, like electing Adolf Hitler to power in 1933. And electing the pathetic French leaders whom he conquered so easily in 1940.
