Why America Needs to Double-Down on Democracy
It has become an increasingly common cry on the far-right of American politics: 'We are a Republic! Not a Democracy...' And, strictly speaking, this is true. America is a republic. The thing is, China is also a republic. Russia is a republic, and so is Iran. According to Merriam-Webster, a republic is defined as, " a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law". In short, all which is needed to join this group of modern nation-states is to host a loosely representative form of government. Yet, America has over the years decided it wished to be much more than this broad, vague definition of a representative state. While at the founding of our nation only land-owning adult, white, Christian males were permitted to vote in many states, by 1848 all adult white men were allowed to vote. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the C...