The founding fathers did not want a democratic rule, as they believed in this approach’s inherent turbulence and unreliability. They saw democracy as mob rule where essential decisions do not get accomplished because of the chaotic nature of this system. The original Constitution guarantees every American state the Republican form of government (“Constitution of the United States,” art. 4, sec. 4), which protects the established U.S. system from the tyranny of the majority.
In a republic, an established set of fundamental laws, such as the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights, bans the government from restricting or removing some “inalienable” rights of the people, even if a majority of the people freely chose that government. The voting majority has nearly infinite power over the minority in a perfect democracy. The primary distinction between a democracy and a republic is the degree to which the people influence the legislative process in each type of government. In a pure democracy, power is held by the entire population, but in a pure republic, power is held by individual citizens.
In a true democracy, all citizens who are eligible to vote to participate equally in the process of enacting laws that govern them. Consecutively, in such a system, all laws are made directly at the ballot box by the voters as a whole. Simply put, in a perfect democracy, the majority actually rules, and the minority has little or no influence. Within this system, freedoms and rights are allegedly protected by the complete removal of the barrier between the public and the societal structure that regulates their lives. Meanwhile, in a republic, the people elect representatives to establish laws and an executive to enforce those laws. While the majority still chooses representatives, a formal charter outlines and protects some fundamental rights, shielding the minority from the majority’s arbitrary political whims.
Work Cited
The U.S. Constitution: Explained—Clause by Clause—for Every American Today. Annotated by Ray Raphael, Vintage, 2017.