eRvin wrote:Well you and I obviously know he is a Marxist, but to most republicans he is a god. I'd quote other Merkan presidents, Repub and Dem, but as you know, they are all Marxists, so there would be no point.
In common English usage, "republic" and "democracy" are the same thing. In a more precise usage, however, the US is a constitutionally limited representative and federated republic, which means that the government is assigned powers via the constitution which are limited (meaning there are some areas which the government cannot legitimately legislate). In the areas where it can legislate, it does so through elected representatives who are elected by a vote of the people in their jurisdiction.
The US President is, technically, not elected by a vote of the people per se. The US President is elected by a vote of delegates to an electoral college. The states are the entities that determined how to select their electors. Nothing in the Constitution says that the individual US citizens vote for the electors or the candidates for President. That's a process that was created state-by-state, and in fact, if you compare the populations of the states to the number of their electors, the ratio is not the same, because each state, no matter how small, gets 2 electors, and then a number of electors equal to the proportion of its population.
A lot of people think that democracy is the all-important ideological concept, and democracy = good. However, democracy is only one aspect of governance, and there are situations where the power of democracy should be properly limited, too. For example, it would not be good for religion to be put to majority vote, meaning that the majority could vote to make an official religion. some countries have that, but it invades a fundamental liberty. It would also not be good to allow democracy to dictate what political opinions are lawful or not.
From the standpoint of the individual, liberty is an important interest, not just democracy. Hence the "limited" bit. And, it's also not pragmatic to have individuals voting on every issue -- most people don't know enough about the nuts-and-bolts of certain issues to allow them to make informed decisions (e.g. should we allocate $x or $y to bridge repair, or should we wait until next year...). So ,that's where the "representative" bit comes in. And, then there is the "republic" bit, meaning we don't have a king or a monarch, but rather supreme power is in the people and their elected representatives. The limitations and the guarantee of a "republican form of government" are contained in the "constitution." And, since we are subdivided into several states with an overarching federal government, we are federated. Ergo - a constitutionally limited, federal, representative republic.
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar
