“You know, we don’t live in a democracy because a democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner. OK? It’s not just majority rule. It’s a constitutional republic. The founders set that up because they followed the biblical admonition of what a civil society is supposed to look like. W...
This is something I'm needlessly pedantic about. Democracy and republic mean roughly the same thing under most definitions. Republic tends to mean a country that's not a monarchy, and democracy tends to mean a place with public input. Nearly every country on Earth outside of absolute monarchies (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Eswatini,etc) is some kind of republic with some level of public input into policy. Everything's a democratic republic.
American Republicans get all bent up about trying to explain how they're structurally different than Democrats even though they're largely two wings of the same bourgeois party
Republic = no monarch or emperor
Democracy = a form of choosing those who govern
This is a very important distinction and you can have either with or without the other. I think that Republicans really want to say that your vote doesn't matter.
Republicanism usually implies that the officials get a sizeable level of autonomy in their decisions once in office, and has no investment in proportional representation.