It is no exaggeration to say that we live in the age of democracy. The word is on every lip, from Beijing to Delhi to Paris to Washington. It is ubiquitous in political commentary and in campaign sloganeering. It has acquired near-mystical appeal among professed socialists, Marxists, and partisans of individual liberty alike. So pervasive is its appeal that almost no political speech fails to pay it proper deference. Democracy has become the catch-all for civic virtue, the ultimate aim of public policy, and is met with almost universal approval among Western leaders.  

Unfortunately, virtually all modern leaders, media pundits, and intellectuals in the so-called free world frequently confound two very different senses of the word “democracy.” In one sense, democracy may have reference to the mode of selecting political representatives via plebiscite or popular vote. In this narrow sense, and in this sense alone, the word may be applied also to our American system — at least with regard to those offices filled by popularly elected candidates. 

But this is not the ordinary sense in which “democracy” is used. It is almost always used to recommend a mode of government, and denotes a system that tries to approximate as closely as possible direct government by the people themselves or their immediate surrogates, who make and execute laws in exact conformance to the ever-evolving tastes of the popular majority. In this latter sense, of course, America is not and was never intended to be a “democracy,” and stood in rather stark contrast to certain ancient attempts at pure democracy, such as Athens, as well as to more modern versions, such as the various instantiations of Revolutionary France (both misnamed “republics”) and the short-lived democracy in Russia, the “Russian Democratic Federal Republic,” led by Alexander Kerensky. 

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