Our rulers constantly talk about “our democracy,” often while justifying doing things which are profoundly anti-democratic. A common midwit response is, “America is not a democracy, it is a republic.” While your ninth grade history teacher may have felt smart telling students that, it is neither a meaningful nor accurate statement. For one thing, those terms are not in contradiction. More importantly, America was founded as a balanced, mixed government but has become a democracy over time, and in its current form is a de jure democracy. This is the source of our miseries.

The claim that the United States is not a democracy is usually in response to insisting the government must do some dumb thing or another because it would make the government closer to every whim of the people, so the person saying “America is not a democracy” generally has better sentiments than the person at which it is targeted. However, a republic is simply a government without a monarch; this has no relevance to whether a country is a democracy. Usually, this is considered to include even a situation like North Korea, where the Kim family are functionally hereditary rulers despite not taking the title of king. What people actually mean when they say that “America is not a democracy, it is a republic” is that the United States is what political theorists call a mixed government, which is to say one which combines monarchy (the president), aristocracy (the Senate), and democracy (the House). “Democracy” is that part of the government which represents the commons, or demos. Any sufficiently complex government combines these to some degree; however, the balance of power varies a great deal.

Democracy in the United States has expanded in two ways over time. The first, the expansion of franchise, is generally positive. Early in American history, land was very cheap in this new world so it was reasonable to need to own property vote. Montesquieu notes that everyone should be able to vote for a representative “except those who are in so mean a situation as to be deemed to have no will of their own.”¹The Spirit of the Laws, I.XI.6. At the time of the founding, any reasonably responsible and mature man would have owned land, but over time this became less true, and one doesn’t want a disenfranchised landless class in the cities, and certainly not a large one of strong young men. The freeing of slaves and the further integration of women in politics both justified expanding franchise, though in my opinion lowering the voting age to eighteen was a mistake, but it was seen as necessary since eighteen-year olds were conscripted to die pointlessly in Vietnam.

The bad way in which democracy has been expanded is in directly voting for the president and the Senate. Originally, electors were selected to choose the president, whereas now it is functionally a vestigial part of our government and states could just submit their vote total with no human called an “elector” and the result would be the same. Incidentally, there is nothing “anti-democratic” about states being apportioned votes; it is simply a way of representing constituent parts of a federal state. The reality, regarding electors, is that the common man is much more qualified to determine if someone in his community is responsible than to directly vote for the executive. Determining electors through a caucus process, as is used by political parties in some states, is a better system for free and competent governance. Montesquieu notes, regarding the importance of representation as opposed to direct democracy generally, that the people collectively are extremely unfit for discussing public affairs (and he didn’t even have Twitter). However, they are “better judges of the capacity of their neighbors than that of rest of their countrymen.”²The Spirit of the Laws, I.XI.6.

Presidential elections becoming more democratic has created a system where each election we deal with two incompetent hacks crossing our country manipulating the public, but it did not break James Madison’s system. What broke Madison’s system was the Seventeenth Amendment mandating the direct election of senators. An upper house is meant to represent landed interests; in our case, the states. By implementing direct elections, it became the case that the demos selects the House, the Senate, and the president. States, the primary constituent part of our federal state, are completely unrepresented at a federal level.

Class analysis of any sort is deeply unpopular among conservatives and libertarians. However, before people were refuting Karl Marx, no one seriously denied that class conflict is a major part of history, and many of our Founders were avid readers of Livy, whose history is full of class conflict. In fact, the very idea of mixed government and the separation of powers is meant to put this natural tendency of conflict between classes to good use. The reality is that financial interests believe in nothing and can profit from any sort of instability, which is why there is what we now call “woke capital.” Among other things, the destruction of traditions and strong families and communities leaves man with little recourse but government assistance or a bank loan. Alternately, landed interests benefit from stability, and are naturally conservative, not in the sense of being “right wing” but in the sense of being cautious and prudent.

A major paradox of government is that if the demos has all the de jure power, an oligarchy of financial interests has all the de facto power, which is the unfortunate situation in which we find ourselves. This is because the demos is poor and is always desperate for money and credit, and thus can be bought off by financial interests, as can the demagogues who seek to be elected by them. Lower houses are expected to be large, unruly bodies which contain crackpots, corrupt demagogues, and other ridiculous or non-credible people from across society, which is why their power must be limited. However, the upper house is not meant to be like this. The direct election of senators guaranteed that their majority would be corrupt pawns of oligarchs. It is much harder to buy an entire state legislature that selects a senator than the senator themself. Further, if the senator is corrupted after his selection, the legislature can provide reasonably competent oversight, whereas the public may or may not notice biennial elections.

It is simply incorrect to argue that the United States is not a democracy when the state lower house, state upper house, governor, various state positions, federal lower house, federal upper house, and president are all officially selected by the commons. That there is a system of apportionment because the federal government is federal doesn’t make this less democratic. The only check on the demos is the judiciary, and the courts are also selected by a president and Senate that are chosen directly by voters. The reason that it seems as if we have no meaningful voice is because the demos being overpowered has had the inevitable result of giving all of the power to financial interests. The great historian Polybius wrote, “Every political system has a source of corruption growing within it from which it is inseparable…for democracy it is government by brute force”.³6.10. This, obviously, is where we are. More “democracy” will only increase our enslavement. The corporations are having a field day promoting wars and deviant lifestyles because they want to profit from our, and the world’s, instability.

The only solution to America’s problems is to stop being a democracy and re-balance mixed government, most of all by repealing the Seventeenth Amendment and returning the Senate to the role of representing state governments, instead of representing “the people,” who seem to have curious names such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase.