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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s terminology. I guess they’d be called so today, yes. They wouldn’t be called like that a few hundred years ago when the term democracy first became public. The word democracy actually has a very interesting history. At the time of the founding of the United States of America, the founding fathers were actually motivated in crafting the constitution of the republic by fears of democracy breaking out. The resulting constitution also never mentioned the word democracy in it.


  • The Netherlands isn’t a republic and republic basically just means “not a monarchy”.

    A republic means a state with representative democracy. (Not strictly necessarily representative, but it’s hard to even imagine a State system with full democracy.)

    You can be a democracy without being a republic and a republic without being a democracy.

    Exactly, because a republic isn’t very democratic. What I’m saying is that representative democracy is barely democratic at all. Especially when using systems like majority rule. In most representative democracies today, the general public is barely if at all participating in the government of public affairs. I’m purposefully using the original meaning of the word democracy: government by the people or the people governing themselves. If the only way we can govern is by checking a box on a ballot twice a decade and that resulting in anywhere between 1 and 250 people having full authority over an entire country, I would not call that governing at all. And it shows that in most republics, policy enacted by their governments rarely represent what people actually want and care about.