What kind of country do we want our children and grandchildren to live in? Do we want them to live in a democracy, or in an autocracy run by a Trump-like authoritarian who can't be removed? In the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, as I pondered these questions, I remembered something related that came up just a few years earlier, less than a mile from the Capitol.
As I prepared for our seminar sessions, I studied the course syllabus and the reading list that the college had given us. We had the students read, among other things, the Federalist papers, the Anti-Federalist papers, and the U.S. Constitution. We planned visits to Capitol Hill to meet with Congressmen, and a visit to the Supreme Court. We scheduled lectures by a lobbyist and by representatives of Washington's think tanks. Often the curriculum included recommended videos; it was one of these videos that alerted me to a strange and damaging argument that has been circulating in the United States.
The video was called "Overview of America -- The American Form of Government." It opened with the famous quote from Benjamin Franklin, who, upon leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1789 was asked by a woman "What have you given us?" Franklin replied, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it." Then the narrator of the video said, "Yet most Americans today have been persuaded that our governmental system is a democracy and not a republic." The narrator then equated democracy with unlimited majority rule. He warned that the majority can decide to take away your home or business or even your children. The narrator next described some frontier justice in the old west: a lynch mob captures and -- after a majority vote of the mob -- hangs their suspect. This is presented as an example of the danger of democracy. In contrast, the narrator describes how under a republic, a sheriff would arrive and insist that the suspect be taken back to town for a fair trial.*
The narrator's negative comments on democracy continued: "Many Americans would be surprised that the word democracy does not appear in the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. Nor does it appear in any of the constitutions of the fifty states." The implication was that democracy is some sort of alien concept that has recently been foisted upon unsuspecting Americans: "The Founders did everything they could to keep us from having a democracy."
It was easy to see what was going on here: The video was setting up a false dichotomy between democracy and republic. In truth, the two words do have different meanings, but they are not mutually exclusive. "Democracy" means rule of the people. Democracy can be direct (as in ancient Athens) or via representatives (as in most modern democracies). "Republic" usually refers to a government made up of representatives. While the video presents this as an either-or choice, in fact our government is both a democracy and a republic. And we have a constitution so we can say that we are a democratic constitutional republic. This is not rocket science. In fact, it really high school civics material.
This is in many ways a form-over-substance problem. Back in the pre-Trump days when we in the Foreign Service were trying to defend and promote good governance overseas, we rightly focused on the extent to which governments and procedures were democratic: Were they reflecting the will of the people? Were people given the opportunity to vote in meaningful elections? The issue of whether a government should be a republic or not never came up. In Latin America they were all -- in form -- republics. Indeed, the State Department bureau that covered the Western Hemisphere was called the Bureau of American Republic Affairs. Being a "republic" was mostly a matter of form. The real issue was whether or not they were -- in substance -- democracies. Many republics are not (or were not) democracies. Like the Peoples' Republic of China. Or the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. Or Iran's Islamic Republic. The substantive issue -- democracy -- is by far the more important thing.
So where was this strange "republic not a democracy" argument coming from? Who made this misleading video? It didn't take me long to find out. The syllabus did not identify the makers of the video, nor were the producers identified on the YouTube page that carried it. But a quick Google search for "Overview of America" yielded the source: I was surprised to discover that The John Birch Society had produced that video. The surprising part was not that the John Birch Society had produced this drivel, but that the National War College had included in their syllabus material from this extremist group.
To be fair, whoever put the video in the syllabus might not have known that the John Birch Society had produced it. Even if they did know, they might not have known what the John Birch Society is. Filling in any possible gaps in my colleagues' background knowledge, I pointed out that the John Birch Society has been, for the last sixty years, an extreme right-wing organization with a penchant for conspiracies. It took a strong stand against racial integration. It frequently equated opposition to its views as "treason." They went so far as to accuse Dwight David Eisenhower of being a treasonous tool of the communists. They circulated posters that read "John F. Kennedy -- Wanted for Treason" in Dallas shortly before President Kennedy was killed. The John Birch Society was so far to the right that the leader of conservatism in the United States, William F. Buckley Jr., condemned the group's leader and urged the Republican party to purge itself of Bircherism.
From the start, the Birchers were weirdly obsessed with the supposed issue of whether the United States is a democracy or a republic. A 1961 New York Times article, for example, reported that John Birch Society founder Robert H.W. Welch Jr. was spearheading an effort to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren. Warren's alleged crime? According to Welch, Warren, "has taken the lead in the drive to convert this country into a democracy."
NYT 1961
To the War College's credit, when I told a senior leader of the faculty about the Bircher origins of the video, he immediately took action to correct the error in the syllabus; I think we ended up identifying the source and designating the video as being optional for seminar discussion. And we did discuss it in my seminar. I explained the origins of the video, the distorted views that I think it presented, and the way it had -- without source identification -- worked its way into our syllabus. I said I thought it was appalling that Americans would be willing to twist our core values in the way that this video did. Some of the students did not share my views on the video; one questioned why I had become so concerned about it. I reminded them that they had all sworn to defend with their lives the Constitution of the United States. So, yes, I was quite spun up about it, and, I added, they should be too. After all, our democratic system -- as laid out in our Constitution -- was what we were all pledged to support, protect and defend. That was what we had all been working and fighting for the twenty of thirty years of our careers. I am not sure what conclusions the students reached, but at least this seminar discussion got them thinking about these issues. And that is what they were there for - to explore arguments like this. So in that sense, the John Birch Society video helped us reach our educational goals.
This was not the last time I heard of this democracy vs. republic issue. It pops up from time to time on social media, usually promoted by someone who seems to be looking for a reason to oppose efforts to strengthen and deepen American democracy. In September 2018 National Review carried an article entitled "Democracy or Republic?" In August 2019 New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote, "Spend enough time talking politics on the internet — or in any other public forum — and you’ll run into this standard reply to anyone who wants more democracy in American government: 'We’re a republic, not a democracy.' " Bouie points out that it came up recently in a Twitter debate between Congressional Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Daniel Crenshaw with Ocasio Cortez pushing for more democracy while Crenshaw argued that we are a republic. **
It is not difficult to see why some are sympathetic to the absurd position of an outdated extremist conspiracy group. If you are in the Republican party, the demographics are moving against you. The country is becoming more urban, younger, and less white. It is getting difficult for your party to win elections. So voter suppression starts to look like an appealing option. In the wake of the 2020 election we see dozens of Republican initiatives across the country aimed at making it more difficult for people to vote. In Arizona, one Republican initiative would allow the state legislature to overturn the state's presidential election results. And of course, Republicans are increasingly resistant to the reform of two institutions that stubbornly defy the "one person, one vote" principle: the Electoral College and the United States Senate. If you are a Republican, and if democracy is one of your personal core values, all of this could put you in an uncomfortable moral quandary. But the strange argument of the John Birch Society might offer you some solace. According to them, we are not and never have been a democracy. We are, they assure you, a republic. Suddenly voter suppression, the Electoral College and the inequalities on Capitol Hill don't seem quite so bad. According to this twisted line of thought, they might in fact, be downright patriotic.
This is of course, dangerous and disloyal nonsense. Donald Trump's disloyalty to the Constitution, his effort to overturn the results of an American election, and his incitement of seditious insurrection all should have alerted us to the need fortify and deepen American democracy. This was a near-death experience for American democracy. Among those those who support Trump, there is a contingent of disingenuous charlatans who claim that the strengthening of our democracy is unnecessary, because, they say, the United States is not and never was intended to be, a democracy. This kind of deliberate obfuscation makes it more difficult to protect democracy in our country, and makes it more likely that future generations of Americans will not live under democratic government. Shame on all those who spread confusion about the true nature of our history and our government.
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* This "a republic not democracy" argument has a lot of adherents among Trump supporters, so it is really ironic and hypocritical that on January 6, people who supposedly fret that democracy will lead to mob rule attacked our democracy with a mob. The video's use of the lynch mob example also reeks of hypocrisy; Trump has the support of white supremacists, who have been the main perpetrators of lynchings in this country, lynchings that took place under the republican form of government in counties with sheriffs. The problem was not a lack of a republican government structure. The problem was a severe lack of democracy, with millions of black Americans left powerless by racist Jim Crow legislation.
** It even came up during Trump's second impeachment. On February 9, 2021, during opening statements, Trump lawyer David Schoen mentioned that the Founders feared the thuggery and chaos that might result from democracy. Like the Birchers, he failed to make clear that the what the founders feared was direct, Athenian-style democracy. But then he completely broke with the Birchers by bashing the Founders, calling them "elitists" and criticizing their "fear of democracy." He then boldly declared that, "we don't fear democracy, we embrace democracy." It was really strange to see someone who was trying to argue that we should adhere strictly to his interpretations what the Founders put in the Constitution go on to bash the Founders, call them elitists, and proclaim a deep ideological separation from them. Schoen also appeared to be unaware that he was breaking with those on the American right (like the Birchers) who usually claim that the Founders were right to fear democracy, and that they were right to set up a government that is not a democracy but a republic.
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Here is a January 2022 Washington Post review of a book that discusses the John Birch Society: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/tracing-the-origins-of-todays-ultraconservatives/2021/12/29/ae14b39a-496c-11ec-b8d9-232f4afe4d9b_story.html
Here is a song about the John Birch Society:
The John Birch Society is mentioned in classic rock song "Uneasy Rider":
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