A Brief but Bigoted History of “We’re a Republic, Not a Democracy” (part 1 of 4: barely concealed American racism & xenophobia)
Tracing a conservative slogan’s chronological arc from an inconspicuous tagline to a regurgitated maxim of secessionists, segregationists, proto-fascists, neo-fascists, and duplicitous Right-wing political critters.
The American system of government is packed with old conundrums and intricacies. Those who passed their high school AmGov classes may remember learning that its founding documents are not exactly the most straight forward. The world’s oldest constitution exudes a sense of “flying by the seat of one’s pants while trying to sound fancy.” Good or bad, most modern nations have since been inspired to make their charters more updatable and more verbose to smartly avoid legal confusions and misinterpretations.
It is almost mesmerizing how every other Supreme Court decision tends to be some epic game-changer boiling down to pithy interpretations of 250-year-old vaguery and vibes. As well, an incessant American addiction to embracing ahistoric viewpoints helps little and their adoption by disingenuous political characters with poor understanding of etymology seems to make the political waters even muddier.
Frankly, the particularly untidy issue of how to classify the United States of America’s structure of government has already been drubbed to death by a plethora of well-written academic literature and dissertations from fellow history-nerds. If quibbling over political theories were a herd of horses, they would have been beaten into a vat of glue well before any of our grandparents were born. For most Americans, the nomenclature means much less than how they are represented in a land that purports to be created by “We The People” to establish justice and keep themselves generally healthy, safe, and secure.
Despite the country’s original architects being overly concerned with snazzy wording as they cobbled together a nation less technologically advanced than a contemporary Amish community, there has been a long line of smug pedants who go out of their way to whip out the ol’ “We are a Republic, Not a Democracy” trope at the end of rants over modern issues into the online ether. Almost as if it were some magical mic-drop (a very rare thing in Amish country) we have no choice but to nod and begin praisingly clapping at. Unfortunately these self-classifying scholars have not been using the phrasing for sincere discussions over antique terms, instead opting to use it as a semantic justification of divisive political policies that would be detrimental to anybody who was not an already well-off male of European descent.
Much has already been written about the authoritarianism surrounding the invocation of this 7-word canard and the insinuations when cited by conservative personalities. Some have nerdily discussed the phrase’s ambiguous usage by a few of America’s founders or how it harks back to America First Committee supporters’ writings to later be picked up by their Bircher inheritors. But typically, the discourse tends to gloss over the volumes of antisemitism, moral panickery, classism, xenophobia, and unabashed racism accompanying its usage & the users of the expression.
So a deep spelunking into archives of governmental records, academic publications, newspapers, literature, speeches, and websites galore was undertaken. It may not look it, but we have attempted to tell the quickest story of how this “We’re a Republic Not a Democracy” cliche has been brandished since spawned by the words of “Plubius” in 1787. As we whip through the timeline and profiles, the reader will notice that there is an overwhelming amount of context. Piles of links are provided to help spell out details which would take a chapter or more in a book to break down.
To make this a bit easier for all of us to digest, we have broken all this up into 4 parts. The first two follow the historic trail of the idiom’s usage. We then finish with residual but obligatory context, also in two parts, which should give most any sane American a bit of the shudders anytime they hear this cretinous expression going forth.
(in order to save the author & reader some sanity, we will often use “RNAD” when referring to this article’s catchphrase going forth as well)
Plubius
As an Appeal to a 235-year-old Authority, “We Are A Republic And Not A Democracy” is ultimately referencing Madison’s Federalist № 10 essay regarding how to sustain public interests without infringing on the rights of individuals. As “Plubius,” Madison discusses combining elements of democracy and republicanism to create a decentralized system of government to deal with a populace spread out over a capacious confederacy. Endless discussions have been had over what a handful of America’s framers really meant by such terminology and similar remarks since the pseudonymous disquisition appeared on newsprint in the closing months of 1787.
Particularly over the last century, conservatives have proudly pointed to Madison’s prose like it was some kind of final-say. As if history stopped over two centuries ago and words’ meanings never evolve or writers are simply humans who can also have different interpretations and blind-spots. Historians and pedantic nerds (such as your’s truly) tend to point out that “democracy” and “republic” had been used almost interchangeably long before the U.S. signed off on its constitution. Madison and others involved with constructing a novel monarch-less government had already used both terms to refer to their nation. We will come back to this on the backside, but those who penned the essays as “Plubius,” otherwise known as the Federalist Papers, acknowledged that they were using “democracy” specifically to refer to a “pure democracy” (“direct democracy” as we tend to call it now). Much of it in order to evade having to consider the unfathomable logistics an unfettered system of government for a bulky and inequitable society spread across a landmass, especially in the era of slavery and horse & buggies, required without shooting themselves in their own well-heeled feet.
Making use of some fancy internet sleuthin’ skills (i.e., running wads of terms through a myriad of search filters), we eventually came across an 1818 book which looks to be one of the earliest passages declaring that “the United States is not a democracy” because “illustrious sages” of the Constitutional Convention had thoughtfully built in “the wisdom and energy of aristocracy” to temper the “turbulence” and “fluctuation and weakness of unbalanced democracy.” Nevertheless, as per John Bristed’s America and Her Resources, the novice-nation was a “representative republic […] obliged to exist too much by exciting and following the passions and prejudices of the multitude.” The chief crux of the book was cautioning that allowing immigrants and Free Blacks to be involved in any component of the local, state, or federal political process would lead to the country’s suicide.
The 500 page tome also stressed the evils of slavery. More so for fear of slave-owners’ safety, if their slaves would ever have the gumption to revolt against their “masters.” Being opposed to slavery on the grounds of not wanting to be around Black people was not all that uncommon in abolitionist circles. Bristed did his part by proposing that the “wretched African race” be sent back to help civilize the “immense continent of Africa, containing a hundred and fifty millions of Mahomedans and Pagans, steeped in ignorance, superstition, brutality, vice, and crime.”
Bristed’s book set an uncanny tone for the rhetoric and the persuasion of people who would subsequently employ anti-democratic and RNAD verbiage to bolster unnerving political positions within specious arguments that basically amounted to the “othering” of their fellow countrymen. Revulsion to any demographic change is now a very familiar fash-y dinger and although this was less than a generation into a new America, he was by far not the first to cry about his less-than-white neighbors. (here’s looking at you Benjamin Franklin) But to promote his proposed fixes for fabricated issues, such as using the gallows for minor crimes to curb a burgeoning population of non-English immigrants and Black people, Bristed had to really sell it. Like an early-19th century version of a recent tweet from some blue-checked white-replacement-obsessed account that the current CEO of Xchan regularly interacts with, the Episcopalian clergyman (and immigrant) had his rage-farming shtick down:
The sparse amount uncovered from online print and governmental records suggests that the polemical RNAD was overall atypical for the next half century. Yet discussions concerning what was and was not “democratic” about the fledgling nation and the fundamentals which made up its relatively progressive and dynamic society became en vogue. Authors and journalists visiting from Europe, like Touqueville, built careers based around this discourse. Democratic movements beyond the eastern shores of the Atlantic bloomed in fits & starts, depending on how oppressive or progressive the local authorities decided to be.
Nullification & Slavery
It would be irresponsible not to shine a brief spotlight on South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun (DR/D-SC) and the Nullification Crisis of the early 1830s. Although quite the neckbeard-rocking nationalist in his early political career, Calhoun was an exceptionally racist (even for his time) defender of slavery who resigned from being Andrew Jackson’s vice-president to represent South Carolina’s attempt to void federal tariffs. Calhoun professed that all states are sovereign entities and the Constitution was only a compact of separate sovereign states who have the right to annul federal laws which they may deem unconstitutional. In reality, the Constitution’s Article III and Supremacy Clause, as well as several Federalist papers, including Madison’s № 39 and № 44, make it clear that states cannot just abrogate federal law and would instead need to take it up with the Supreme Court.
The banal “States’ Rights” is simply repackaged Calhoun’s “concurrent majority,” the principle underpinning his doctrine of nullification. To prevent tyranny of the “majority” (free-states not reliant on the 3/5ths clause for electoral college or Congressional representation), the “minority” (slave-states) can void federal laws like those concerning tariffs, anti-slavery, anti-segregation, voting rights, or health care access.
We should note that while Calhoun had used RNAD to describe his home-state of South Carolina a few years prior, he directly referred to the “Federal Republic” as also being a “Constitutional Democracy” designed by “the immortal framers of our Constitution,” in 1841. And although peculiarly remembered as a “defender of minorities,” he was quite clear that the only minority he cared protecting was a slave-holding South, demonstrating that the opposition to federal tariffs were a precursor for a fight to maintain slavery’s legality. Small wonder that the RNAD argument harnessed to “fend off a tyranny of the majority” would become part of the conservative “States’ Rights” jargon a century later. As historian Richard Hofstadter put it:
Another anti-democracy panjandrum of the era, Orestes Brownson, was the originator of the xenophobic-laden term “Americanization” and a pioneer in the national pastime of obsessing over the downfall of the country, believing that democracy would “lower the standard of morality, to enfeeble intellect, to abase character, and retard civilization.”
Brownson argued that the biggest national threat lied in affording any autonomy to the unpropertied working class of the cities, which would somehow lead to an aristocracy of elected wealthy business owners. Interesting given that the Constitution’s Framers essentially constructed something that, although progressive for its time, would technically be considered an oligarchy built on affluent familial ties. And seeing as how less than a century later, wealthy industrialists would make an inverted argument against democracy, in a Mencken-esque way, he was not wholly incorrect. Of course it would be expected that a government built as a republic (a political parallel to a company ran by a board of directors) would not also turn into “a government run like a business” (a now familiar leitmotif of many conservative political campaigns). Brownson, though, was very clear that his version of the republic would be a theocracy led by the Church of Rome in order to rescue the country from ruin.
Despite the nullification crisis and other disagreements nudging America towards a civil war, the expression that had emanated from Federalist №10 still rarely popped up in public discourse until pro-slavery congressmen began to throw it around in 1858 to complain about Kansas becoming a free state, a la Rep. George Taylor (D-NY), or to make Calhoun-y Madison-invoking speeches, via Senator Clement Claiborne Clay (D-AL), about a republic being the only “stable and conservative” form of government which could keep slavery in the South from being ended by some tyrannical equality-minded democracy.
Eerie utterances to see 160 years on, but we should consider that a few years later Clay became a conspicuous member of the Confederate’s Congress, co-created a network of secret spies for the South, was suspected of organizing Lincoln’s assassination, and whose face was printed on their money.
1880s Political Campaigns and an Eccentric Anti-Suffragist
The US Civil War was distracting enough that, for at least a couple of decades, few cared to ponder the specificity of the country’s descriptor. Instead, political creatures of all stripes applied both terms mostly interchangeably. But in 1882, to give a taster of what was to come a half-century later, the Republican Party drafted a textbook of campaign talking points as a response to the 1876 election, in which the Democratic candidate received 184 uncontested electoral votes to the Republican’s 165.
Four states returned 20 votes-worth of disputed electors, which Hayes (R) needed in order to win the presidency. The resulting Electoral Commission and the 1877 Compromise essentially ended Reconstruction, leaving Blacks with negligible political support and protections in the South under Jim Crow laws. (This debacle also led to the 1877 Electoral Count Act and why Pence could not reject electors in January of 2021.)
Going forward, as per the Republican manual, campaigns were to emphasize that if enough voters in low-population states are represented by a majority of electors overall, even when vastly outnumbered by the votes in heavily populated states, then the election should be considered legit. Non-Americans looking in could justifiably dub this “tyranny of the minority,” as the campaign textbook pointed out that the six electoral votes of Delaware and Nevada’s 43,824 human votes equaled the same as California’s 154,459. But “American Exceptionalism” also means reveling in lopsided systems as long as one waves the flag the hardest and mendaciously paints “democracy” as the opposite of any constitutional checks and balances, despite contemporary democracies elsewhere having exactly all that enshrined in their own constitutions:
Another aspect of exceptional Americanism is conveniently forgetting recent pasts. The abolitionist establishers of the Republican Party had came up with a very democratic principle for their third plank in their party’s original 1855 platform:
So the Gilded Age kicked off with the rather exclusive usance of “We’re a Republic, Not a Democracy” by a very privileged monied class of eccentric white people.
In her 1885 book, How We are Governed, lifelong anti-suffragist Anna Laurens Dawes leaned right into the conflation of “democracy” with “pure democracy” to accompany this RNAD verbalism. Even as she perfectly described “democracy” as the choosing of representatives in a large nation like the U.S., she also declaimed “democracy” to be unworkable for large nations such as hers.
Dawes spent much of her life railing against allowing women to vote, maintaining that “feminine nature is unsuited to government,” and became famous for two controversial publications. Her philosemetic 1886 The Modern Jew: His Present and his Future does a decent job predicting the creation of Israel. But as most philosemetism tends to go, it held a heavy air of antisemitism with its othering-focus on Jewish people, who in her view, were not expected or able to be a meaningful element of society.
The rich elitess’ 1917 The Indian as Citizen was written to support her father’s Dawes Act of three decades prior, which forced Native Americans to assimilate into American society and remove any last vestiges their own self-government.
Who would suspect that an affluent socialite, whose father had written legislation to strip away Native Americans’ governance over their own communities and lands, would be against allowing half the country to cast ballots in their country’s polls and be so oppositional to democracy’s most basic tenets? Honestly at this point, we would.
Super Duper Rich Fellas
Thinkers and politicians of the 19th century had incorporated “Jeffersonian democracy” as a common descriptor for how the country was running, but most Americans, as well the rest of the world, skipped semantics and embraced “this great Republic -the foremost democracy” going into the future.
Yet quibbles remained in expected over-influential corners. RNAD’s second act began (and remains) as a magical shield of patter to fend off trade-unionism, socialism, and any other -ism attracting the indignation from the “captains of industry.” Racial political matters, like anti-immigration and preserving slavery, had been 1800s problems to crusade for with RNAD as pretext. The comparative 1900s, though, were the beginning of the idiom’s use in antisemitic imbued arguments against the labor movement.
(we touch on a few popular books of the 1910’s having an unpredictable hand in bringing the phrase back into vogue for the well-healed class on the backside)
“The Fathers created a republic and not a democracy” was the very first line in former Secretary of the Treasury turned big-city banker Leslie M. Shaw’s (R-IA) 1919 Vanishing Landmarks; the trend toward bolsehvism, a tirade from a wealthy conservative suffering a meltdown over any non-white men, women, poor, Native American, or immigrants having any say in the political process. This was just the beginnings of perpetual Red Scares, constructed with armies of straw-men slapped together to depict “democracy” as a concept socialists had conjured up to sell their takeover of the US and depose its enchanted business/church-like government.
Oilman, financier, and Citgo-founder Henry Latham Doherty soon followed by couching RNAD in a self-agrandizing Haratio Alger-eque 1920 article in the New York Tribune:
Doherty’s column was more or less a bingo-card of every out-of-touch über-rich “let them eat cake” recycled talking-point we all have heard too many times already…
If the poor could simply learn to be more thrifty, crime & prostitution will be halved and they will all assuredly get to be rich like him. Low wages & longer hours in dangerous physically-draining jobs is actually a favorable thing fro everybody and will help us abstain from inventing loathsome labor-saving devices or risk a reduction in US exports. Otherwise, housewives will endure undue burdens when men are at home annoyingly spending too much time with their families. Unions will entice medical doctors to quit to be high-paid tradesmen and a less than 60-hour work week will turn us all into a “race of mollycoddles.”
Super fun familiar stuff.
On the other side of the continent, the LA Times published an editorial grousing over how voters were clearly too ignorant to understand even the most mundane of ballot measures, insisting RNAD was the reason why representatives (in gerrymandered districts) were the only ones who should decide if the citizens of California deserve to be blessed with any new statutes.
And a congressman whose racism inspired the coming Japanese internment camps during WWII, Sen. Shortridge (R-CA), found it strangely imperative to slip in a little context-free RNAD while discussing his support for an increase of postal employee’s salaries in 1925.
Red Scares & Model Ts
As revolts and revolutions flared up in other lands, a related moral panic was building steam in the US. The richer stratum, with over-sized influence on governance and what made it into the circulars, refused to believe that any red-blooded American, especially the multitudes of overworked & underpaid, could ever have the gall to entertain any ideas remotely associated with socialism, like fair-pay, equality, or live-ability. Unlucky targets in the shape of recent southern and eastern European immigrants, cast as importers of revolutionary political and economic schemes to stain society with crimson colored communism, became some of the first scapegoats of the 20th century.
The Second Ku Klux Klan had recently re-declared themselves the defenders of white protestant America against a foreign Marxist degeneracy and got themselves busy digging their hooks into both major political parties.
Henry Ford purchased the wide-circulated Dearborn Independent and put its presses to work sharing what was “discovered” in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a glaringly built-for-disinformation manuscript that had “surfaced” in Russia a few decades.
It is difficult to keep the history of RNAD’s misinterpretations and misuse brief enough for a short article without getting too deep into the messy weeds of bigotry, but more masochistic readers are welcome to hurl themselves into the nauseous background of the “The Protocols” to learn about Ford’s The International Jew pamphlets, the men who “found” it for him (and were also deeply involved in the America First movements and the pro-Nazi American Bund), and how many discreditable antisemitic tropes have since stemmed from this counterfeit codex. But there is a bright blinking caveat that such rabbit holes from here on out do tend to lead to increasingly more horribly racist and genocidal material. oof.
Ford-approved antisemitic rants were collected in The International Jew. For anyone paying a modicum of notice, its contents are regularly reflected in the diatribes crawling out of the angriest pallid corners of society and into mainstream right-wing discourse and X-twitter’s “For You” feed. Although he never directly adduces RNAD, Ford obsessively lays all blame for democracy, as well as both banking and Marxism, jazz, booze, anything “liberal,” and all other kinds of earthly woes on the Jews…
“The Protocols distinctly declare that it is by means of the set of ideals which cluster around “democracy,” that their first victory over public opinion was obtained. The idea is the weapon. Democracy is merely a tool of a word which Jewish agitators use to raise themselves to the ordinary level in places where they are oppressed below it; but having reached the common level they immediately make efforts for special privileges, as being entitled to them.”
With the help of rampant xenophobia and much influence from white supremacists like the Klan and erudite-esque eugenicists, the Immigration Act of 1924 was enacted. Little coincidence that a Red Scare, an Immigrant Scare, and a noticeable uptick in antisemitism was happening simultaneously. A stock market crash, the subsequent Great Depression, and what it took to correct course in a relatively progressive era, while fascism was on the rise elsewhere, made for an icky concoction that built the RNAD brand that has persisted for decades since .
FDR and the “Jew Deal”
The proverbial mask often slipped off a bit too easily for those who frequently went out of their way to proclaim, “we’re a republic, not a democracy.” It was quickly becoming an aging chestnut, which required minimal repurposing for the well-off to make arguments for opposing New Deal programs enacted to aid in alleviating the nation’s economic predicament and move the country into the future.
Industrialists mustered their half-century old anti-labor lobby groups, like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), to counter Roosevelt’s progressive economic policies and push a curriculum into American public schools to instill a fear of immigrants, labor-organizing, and the insidious specter of “democracy” that they alleged would create a class war to destroy the nation that was “intended to be a republic but not a democracy.” By 1928, they had already successfully inserted similar RNAD phrasing into the Army Training Manual of Citizenship. However, as Commander-in-Chief, Roosevelt and his administration ended the distribution of the guidebook four years later. The manual’s content eerily reflected a surge of chauvinistic rhetoric with sections on the art of self-governance being specifically “the product of distinct [Anglo-Saxon] racial stocks.” New immigrants were classified as a drain on the fabric of American society founded on “reverence and respect for family and race” threatened by an imported “mobocracy” bent on transforming upright citizens into lazy atheistic communistic anarchists. Most sane active duty and veterans would surely call it “cringe” if it were printed today.
Europe was still recovering from the Great War concurrently enduring an ensuing escalation of extremist politics and strife. Reactionary industrialists backed the rise of fascist regimes in regions eyeing the lands beyond their borders while ecstatically othering portions of their own populations. Tensions rose as the U.S., under FDR, had to choose between helping remaining democracies stop a disturbing spread of belligerence or to remain isolationists curled up in a fleeting sense of safety provided by oceanic distances.
Back in the 48 states, led by deep pockets already actively opposing the president’s recent domestic policies, the America First Committee (AFC) was organized as an amalgamated pressure group for those opposing intervention, attracting other wealthy industrialists as well as radicals, socialists, communists, anti-communists, pacifists, and contrarian FDR-haters. Because of its founders and political position on foreign policies, it also attracted antisemites and fascism-enthusiasts in similar veins of their most renown spokesmen, Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.
Some AFC leaders and notable members were also benefactors of antisemitic pro-Franco activists and their organizations. Others held sympathies towards or directly worked with European fascist regimes, such as International Olympic Committee president and Hitler-friendly German-American Bund rally-speaker Avery Brundage, aviator & convicted Nazi-agent Laura Ingalls with her famed rants decrying “lousy democracy,” infamous anti-labor Anglo-Israelite radio commentator & columnist Boake Carter, and the founder of the red-panicked Christian Anti-Defamation League & author of several pro-Nazi propaganda books fixated on tying communism to the Jews Elizabeth Dilling, whose “main devices of promoting fascism was to split hairs on definitions”…
It also does not help the historical optics when a founder’s son (also an AFC member) went on to publish books for the John Birch Society and apartheid-apologists. Especially rough is the fact that his grandson, William Regney II, was the money-man for several white supremacist periodicals and established the alt-Right’s (now defunct) lobby group, the National Policy Institute.
Nor is it great that establishing member Robert Rutherford McCormick, owner of the conservative Chicago Tribune, allowed his close friend Harry Jung to keep offices in the paper’s Tribune Tower. Jung published antisemitic and racist pamphlets throughout the 1930s, like Communism and the Negro and the Nazi-funded paper The American Gentile, and organized the antisemitic/anti-New Deal lobbying group American Vigilant Intelligence Federation.
Similarly, AFC co-founder and Sears chairman General Robert E. Wood funded the creation of the “Manion Forum,” a conservative radio program hosted by Clarence Manion, the soon-to-be lead promoter of T. Coleman Andrew’s campaign for president in 1956 as a candidate for the white supremacist States’ Rights Party and Christian Nationalist Party (aka Constitution Party, aka America First Party).
Those with a cursory knowledge of history know antisemitism and the Red Scares were barely-refined scapegoat fuel for conservatives and hard-Right groups during the lead up to America’s entry into the Second World War. Many with power and wealth, who had long soured on the New Deal, took issue with FDR’s attempts to expand the courts and believed that sending aid to Britain was a folly, choosing to instead look inward while the rest of the world was rapidly becoming smaller.
Smaller minor-league-esque AFC affiliated groups, like the “Native Sons and Native Daughters of the Golden West,” borrowed Shaw’s racist invocations of RNAD to claim that only “socialists, near-socialists, anarchists and bolsheviki” were enthusiastic about “democracy.” As supportive of nearby indigenous rights as a batch of Californian racists could be in the early-1900s, the Native Sons/Daughters of the Golden West opposed immigration and naturalization of Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican residents and laborers; going so far to file lawsuits to disenfranchise Japanese-Americans during World War II. Having been soused in some white ethnostate thinking for a few decades already, they were a bit ahead of others who would later emerge from the America First rabble.
Echoing Ford’s antisemitic tracts, radio personalities used the new medium to spread pro-fascist propaganda over the airwaves. Infamously antisemitic but ever-popular Father Coughlin had been sermonizing to families over the previous decade through living-room radio sets, blaming the Great Depression on both the communists and the bankers involved in a Jewish plan code-named “democracy.” Meanwhile his Christian Front and the German-American Bund, led by former-Ford employee Fritz Kuhn, made RNAD one of their maxims.
“We are a republic, not a democracy” was evolving into its truer form of a microcephalic umbrella argument for anti-FDR, anti-communism, anti-civil rights, and antisemitism. The New Deal, the President’s popularity, and the general revulsion of overtly fascist tenors contributed to keeping these kinds of sentiments and the phrase from becoming mainstream sentiments. Thus, RNAD remained almost exclusively propagated in Right-wing circles in cahoots and/or adjacent to the AFC. Although his black book was filled with AFC leaders, Minnesota pastor Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith created a separate America First Party to rally more extreme America Firsters who concurred with its diktats of “America was a constitutional republic; not a democracy,” “CHRIST FIRST IN AMERICA! AMERICA FIRST IN WAR AND PEACE!,” and Smith’s calls to fight “Jew Deal Communism,” fueled by his belief that “the only good Jew is a dead Jew.”
During the war, Smith headlined rallies alongside Father Coughlin and joined William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts, an American spin on Hitler’s Brown Shirts intended to be the fascist street-fighting wing of the Christian Party of America, sharing analogous rhetoric stemming from Ford’s “Protocols.” (FUN FACT: Pelley was also a British-Israelism acolyte and mentioned in Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here alongside a few American-Firsters we have introduced above)
In the 1930s, Pelley sometimes referred to America as a “democracy,” but only in terms of it being a theocratic “TRUE DEMOCRACY OF JESUS THE CHRIST.” By 1936, he would claim…
And later in his book There IS a Jewish World Plot… JEWS SAY SO!:
Fascism is Really Bad at Taking Hints
Not long after democratic-inclined nations had routed the principal fascist threats in Europe and Asia, Truman defeated Dewey in a close 1948 election. Yet both parties’ solid beating of conservative white-grievance political campaigns run by a blustering Southern Democratic/Dixiecrats/States’ Rights Party and their kindred far-right groups inferred a discernible uptick in far-right organizing. As we will keep noticing, RNAD was frequently the framing for execrably extremist hyperbolism to aid in the normalization of bigoted political platforms for the coming century.
Akin to a callback to the 1882 Republican campaign text book, centrist Republicans predictably re-employed the phrase to critique a two decade run of Democratic administrations. Complaints about the New Deal, the Supreme Court, public schools, perceived commingling of the branches of government, and consistent Democratic wins were targets to levy RNAD at; something that may be expected during a time of nonstop political frustration. For instance, Representative Frances Bolton (R-OH) gave the game away in front of a Republican women’s group in 1949, complaining that the New Deal and the Democratic Party were supposedly being conflated with the nation’s “democratic principles of government.” But also exclaimed “We are a republic, not a democracy” in her speech that could be described as puerile generalizations. (Given how the brass-ring for the GOP establishment & think tanks nowadays is to lock in an infallibly autocratic President under the “Unitary Executive” theory, looking back at these words is simply adorable)
But the loudest and most common usage continued to be bellowed from those with connections reaching back to the previous decades’ America First movements.
Common Sense was an “anti-communist” newspaper circulated by Conde McGinley, a co-founder of the aforementioned Christian Anti-Defamation League and the Christian Educational Association, which became an influential pro-Nazi and antisemetism broadsheet in the mid-1900s. Common Sense regularly featured editorials by pro-fascists with a standard theme:
McGinley’s publication was bankrolled by “Judge Armstrong,” an organizer for the KKK and Texas oilman who famously attempted to make deals to fully fund colleges if they would reject Jewish & Black students and teach white supremacy. As vainglorious white supremacists do, George Washington Armstrong also wrote more than a dozen racist and extremely antisemitic books, regularly reprising RNAD alongside heaps of “Protocols” hooey. So he certainly deserves a paragraph as well. George has long passed, but the Armstrong Foundation he had created consistently funds almost every influential conservative and Libertarian™ activist/think-tank currently influencing state and federal Republican policy platforms (more on that in Part 3)…
Antisemitic conspiracy-theory-laden editorials from Firster Elizabeth Dilling, naziism-fan George Van Horn Moseley, and controversial radio personality Upton Close also regularly appeared in Common Sense. Close was another bombastic white-grievance grifter in the vein of Carter and Coughlin, who used his voice and ink to share his antisemitic views, including writing the forward for Robert H. Williams’ The Anti-Defamation League and Its Use in the World Communist Offensive treatise about a “Jewish conspiracy,” contending that “democracy” ultimately meant communism. (FUN FACT: Williams was also a holocaust denier and believed Eisenhower was owned by the Jews.)
McGinley’s newspaper helped drum up McCarthy’s Red Scare vers. 2.0, with articles defining communism as “Judaism” and attacking Jewish people and other minorites for purportedly creating a “One World Government” (soon after to be known as Z.O.G.). It also regularly reprinted articles from the ethno-nationalistic American Rennaissance and a pile of antisemetic propaganda reputedly introducing the American Nazi Party’s founder, George Lincoln Rockwell, to the “Jewish Conspiracy” baloney.
Furthermore, Common Sense propagandized for a multitude of other like-minded fascist and hate groups, publishing and advertising work by various white supremacists like Robert E. Edmondson. RNAD naturally fit well and quite often into the ramblings of the Jew-baiting pamphlets Edmonson had distributed since the 1930s. “Communism as a Jewish plot” was stock but shallow subtext to what became slurs of “globalist” and “woke commies” now encapsulated in the spittle spurted from modern talking-heads’ tirades at “young Republican” conferences organized by piqued boys like Nick Fuentes’ America First PAC or Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. If we can already come up with one take-way, it is that “democracy” has been handily lumped into some of the most bigoted dog-whistles much more than “republic” has ever been explained or defined by any of these factions of fanatics.
By the mid-1940s, Edmonson had organized the Pan-Aryan Conference as a bulwark to stop “the Jewish-Communist takeover of America” based on the soon-to-be Bircher belief that FDR was a Communist-Jew, entitled “He Is Not One of Us!” Edmonson’s “research” was also the forerunner to William L. Pierce’s Who Rules America?
(Pierce also wrote Hunter and The Turner Diaries. The latter talks of a “Day of the Rope,” an American-styled kristallnacht that is commonly referred to in the hard-right/White Power milieu, which inspired McVeigh to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, as well as other “white replacement” conspiracy theory obsessed mass shooters over at least the last decade)
Staying on brand, Edmonson’s 1953 book, I testify against the Jews is inundated with “We are a Republic Not a Democracy.” (FUN-FACT: Edmonson also believed flouride in public water was a communist plot)
The RNAD tagline continued to be put to use by exceedingly aberrant characters in post-war America.
Über-conservative self-help guru George W. Crane persistently used the story of Pontius Pilate convicting Jesus to death as an example of what the “mobocracy” would be like if the US was not conserved as a “republic.”
Howard Rand, editor of Destiny Magazine and head of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America would drop the catchphrase in the midst of fulminations over respected journalists critical of McCarthy’s Un-American Committee with the audacity to discuss democracy on their radio shows. Rand is considered to be the catalyst for the white supremacist Christian Identity movement’s evolution from British-Israelism. Claims that the Jews were behind the Communist Revolution and that Zionism & Communism were inexorably linked filled the pages of Destiny. (we briefly discuss Christian Identity in Part 2)
Communism is Civil Rights
Shifts in the nation’s demographics became more noticeable as the U.S. grew bigger in its britches, making the world seem smaller and its populace realize that their culture did not need to remain exclusively pink-skinned and protestant. Some of the most vociferous members of the powerful, profuse, and easily sunburnt segments of the population adopted RNAD as an opportune rallying cry for rejecting the integration of society being ushered in by the phantom of communism. Such themes remain well associated with “Republic, Not a Democracy,” thanks to a handful of political actors with a massively outsized affect on American politics.
For his 1956 senatorial campaign, the former Georgia governor, who had battled the Brown v. Board of Education decision by attempting to abolish the entire state’s public schools system, a second cousin of Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond (R-SC), cover-upper-er of lynchings, and friend of the Klan, Herman Talmadge (D-GA), published an infamous pamphlet entitled You and Segregation. Like something Calhoun would have penned more than a century earlier, he propounded that integration, or anything else mandated from a federal level, was downright unconstitutional. But now, it came down to the fib that “democracy” was absolutely synonymous with “race-mixing” and “communism”:
Especially in regions the Black Belt of the South, court decisions and executive orders were threatening a white supremacist status quo. Talmadge and his segregationist successors were announcing that, as far as they were concerned, the only legitimate representatives & decision makers for the rest of the citizenry were well-off white men. The Warren Court affirming a more democratic “one-vote one-person” was correctly feared to end the separation of the races in schools, universities, bedrooms, and plumbing. Instead of dealing with inequality, scapegoating an infiltration by “the Reds” to undermine society became the prevailing tune stuck on repeat like a busted phonograph ever since.
(Quick Interjection: it is not untrue that communists were involved in the civil rights movement. In an attempt to organize workers in the south, they had a hand in pushing for racial equality that most white labor organizations refused to address. The first years of the Cold War quickly put a damper on things, but the Great Depression was a time of different realities. Similar to what happened in the European/Asian/Global south, allying with communist organizing was more so a response to being left with no other way to counter the discrimination and oppressive structures established under Jim Crow and feudalistic sharecropping. Multi-racial groups, like the integrated Southern Tenant Farmers Union, allied themselves with socialist movements, yet would frequently butt heads with the CPUSA. A typical observation from union leaders was that African-Americans tended to embrace unity and were more adept at resisting repression through collective action. On the other hand, Whites tended to be individualistic, less experienced, and could be more easily convinced by farm managers to turn against the struggle. Out of necessity, union organizing has routinely been a fellow traveller of civil rights activism.)
By the end of the 1950s, “We are a republic, not a democracy” was an established shibboleth for the sketchiest edges of the far-right, showing up in pamphlets distributed by the White Citizens Councils, a suburbanized cousin of the KKK, emphasizing that the framers made a republic not a democracy in order to safeguard a white individual’s right to discriminate and states’ rights to segregate. The Supreme Court being influenced by “radical psychologists and sociologists” from the NAACP & communists to unconstitutionally impose civil rights and end the lawful segregation of the races were again the stereotypical concerns. Fuzzy logic was that no provisions of the US Constitution or the Bill of Rights had made “separate but equal” illegal. Speeches recurrently warned that all past nations who had mixed Black and white races endured decline in their culture and civilization; a well-worn parable from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race handed down to neo-nazis for decades to come, not dissimilar to the run of the mill rants from a racist-drunk-uncle at Thanksgiving.
The Christian Nationalist Crusade/Party, a slightly less fash-y named iteration of Pelley’s Silver Shirts, repeatedly put the RNAD apothegm to bigoted use in the holocaust-denying paper Cross and the Flag they began publishing in the ’50s. Its founder, previously mentioned Indiana klansman/Silver Shirt and America First Party presidential founder/candidate Gerald L. K. “We’re going to drive that cripple out of the White House” Smith, had campaigned for Talmadge in the ’30s and later ran as a Republican in Michigan in the ’40s. The Christian Nationalist platform called for deportation of all Jews & African-Americans and aided in George Wallace’s campaigns for office in the 1950’s and 1960's…
“SMITH talked for several hours, principally on a religious theme, among other things likened the Twin Cities to Sodom & Gomorrah in relation to the opposition he has had from the C.I.0. and Communistic elements.
SMITH declared America was a constitutional republic; not — a democracy. …although Smith’s public statements are very closely guarded, he knows that Smith privately is anti-Jewish. He is firmly convinced that the only good Jew is a dead Jew.”
Now that we have this semantic-meets-historic misadventure off and running, how about we check out how the John Birch Society adopted “Republic, Not a Democracy” as a motto, stapled a tinfoil hat on it, and got to work selling segregation and unfettered capitalism until they popped themselves out literal neo-Nazis, the Religious Right, and a Republican think tank/lobby machine built to overturn the rights Americans have fought long and hard for?
It will be like watching grumpy grey nincompoops deliberately getting their red, very white, and blue Mogwai wet and then feeding them after midnight. A real hoot if you are caught up on your ’80s film references…
