Mark C. Poloncarz – April 19, 2025
Today marks the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which served as the beginning of our nation’s Revolutionary War. While it’s an opportunity to remember the courage, sacrifice, and determination of the past, it also challenges us to reflect on our own role as stewards of our nation’s democracy.
In that spirit, I find myself contemplating the history of our democracy, the various forms that democratic government may take, how democracies can fail, and the mistaken and ill-informed belief held by some of our fellow citizens that our nation is not a democracy.
Given how central democracy and representative government were to the American Revolution, it seems surprising that anyone would contest that America is a democracy. And yet, if you read the comments on my or other social media posts about our democracy, you will often find multiple responses stating, “Our nation is not a democracy, it is a republic.”
It is quite clear these commenters are desperate to prove they are smarter than everyone else. However, all their comments reveal is a lack of rudimentary knowledge of political systems and democracies in general.
The word democracy comes from the ancient Greek word “dēmokratía,” or “rule by the people.” Any system of government where the people rule is, at its core, a democracy.
Nothing is more emblematic of that system of thought than the opening phrase of the Preamble to our Constitution: “We the People of the United States,…” In that one short phrase, the founders made it clear that the Constitution and laws that followed were not their document, but ours, and the power of the government was not vested in them, but in us, the people.
Thus, if a democracy is one in which the people rule, our nation is unquestionably a democracy. That does not preclude our government from being a form of democracy, of which there are many. Direct democracies, representative constitutional republics, representative parliamentary republics, and many other forms of democracies exist.
In his seminal 1956 work, “A Preface to Democratic Theory,” political theorist Robert A. Dahl examined various forms of democracies and the rationales behind them to determine the necessary characteristics of a democratic society and how to classify our government. He conducted detailed reviews of Madisonian Democracy, Populist Democracy, and what he termed Polyarchal Democracy to identify the essence of democratic societies.
In the end, Dahl concluded that the American system of government was a hybrid model that cannot be easily placed under any one title, but it was, nevertheless, a democracy. At no point in his analysis, or for most of the significant contributions to the field of democratic theory that followed, has it ever been claimed our nation’s system of governance is not a democracy.
That said, democracies are fragile. They can fail even in representative constitutional democracies. History is replete with examples of democracy’s disappearance from once-great nations, not because it was disliked, but because it was sacrificed to demagogues who promised prosperity in exchange for power.
The best example of this is the constitutional Weimar Republic of Germany. Post World War I Germany was, in the truest sense, a democracy. The people elected a president and their representatives, they had freedom of speech, and there was an explosion of art, culture, and other facets of what we would consider today a democratic society.
The Weimar Republic also had significant weaknesses, all of which were exposed when, in 1933, Hitler was legally appointed Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg. He used his powers to dismantle democracy and create a dictatorship following the burning of the Reichstag, the equivalent of our Capitol. Hitler and the Nazi Party took a fragile constitutional democracy, but a democracy nevertheless, and turned it into the evilest dictatorship the modern world had ever seen.
Democracies, no matter the form, can fail. Our form of government is often referred to as the “American Experiment” because, when it was established, it was entirely distinct from every other form of government that then existed, and its success was uncertain.
Today, too many people have been lulled into a false sense of our government’s permanence. They believe because it has prevailed for centuries or because it has endured near destruction, that it will continue in perpetuity. In truth, it took a horrific civil war to keep the Union together and eliminate the original sin of slavery from our Constitution. It required the voices of countless others who, over the last 250 years, stood up against oppression and demanded the same rights as others. It took people exercising their power to ensure democracy always prevailed.
There is no guarantee our democracy will endure for another 250 years, or even during our lifetimes. The true rulers of our government – the people – must stand up for the democratic ideals of protection of personal liberty, full due process of law to all persons (not just citizens), and the basic understanding in our society that the rule of law governs, not the whims of a particular person. Only then will this grand American Experiment continue on its course to find “a more perfect union.”
Copyright Mark C. Poloncarz, 2025