Winning at Any Cost when the Cost Is Democracy

The current conservative shibboleth “we’re a republic, not a democracy” is deeply flawed as both history and as contemporary English usage. The modern term “democracy” completely includes what our 18th-century Founders meant by the term “republic,” and the eighteenth-century definition of “democracy” describes a kind of state that has not existed in 2,000 years (if it ever really existed at all). If the…