A Brief but Bigoted History of “We're a Republic, Not a Democracy” (2 of 4: if you thought those fascists were bad...)
…check out these Birchers and their very pasty esoteric ethnostatist friends
(if you showed up late, you can still back up to Part 1)
The Least Grape Welch
There is little point in beating around the blandest of berry bushes, the John Birch Society was created by affluent conservative men to promote Gilded Age-esque policies based around a fanciful free-market with well-heeled Caucasian Christian men planted in the highest positions of society. There is a chronic American fairy tale that a patrician class lording over its lessors is the only way to defend against phantasmal “collectivism” invading the land and reshaping it into some hellscape of equality. The Bircher’s become its 20th century storytellers.
Failed candy entrepreneur, Robert “everybody is an illuminati-backed communist” Welch, was a prolific writer whose rhetoric first attracted Midwestern Republicans already deeply steeped in the McCarthyism of the decade before. Although he could not sell a lollipop to a schoolboy, Welch was a skilled schmoozer. Allying with the “right” tycoons and giving speeches extolling the virtues of American “free enterprise” at their get-togethers attracted the support of several corporate interests who soon joined him in cobbling together his new reactionary project.
Over the years, Welch had wrapped himself up in well-worn conspiracy theories about Eisenhower, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the entire federal government all being communists thanks to “the Jews” attempting to expand civil rights and any other programs he believed had gone too far beyond some 1800-something salad-days. “Republic Not a Democracy” became the indubitable mantra for the Birchers to incorporate into their loudest campaigns to paint the civil rights movement and its leaders as communist-stooges involved in a plot to divide America by race (echoed in recent whines of “racism was dead until Obama was let in the White House”), impeach Supreme Court Judge Earl Warren, and anything “progressive” or less than complete laissez-faire capitalism as simply an evil un-American force imported by foreign elements.
The era of right-wing “We're a Republic, Not a Democracy” overt propaganda was solidly underway with the furiousness of white upper-middle class revanchism aimed at a foreign bogeymen hellbent on ending the orthodox Americana of Jim Crow and segregation.
Multitudes of better write ups regarding the influence the Birchers have had on the American conservative movements are a dime a dozen. But for a quick macro-perspective of the RWNJobbery, as much as Welch hoped to make a multi-million member movement to slow history’s forward progression, their support of the Wallace & Goldwater campaign and ally-ship & member-sharing with organized racist & segregationist groups kept them publicly ostracized to the fringes of the Republican Party. Their tactics of turning even the most mundane disputes into a manufactured culture war battle, on the other hand, has been adopted to drum up votes for mainstream Republicans in lieu of rustling up genuine policy proposals. So much so that much of what Welch had envisioned and fostered has come to fruition in recent years.
Much of their political positions and rhetoric had already been assembled in corners of society under the flickering glow of burning crosses and merely repackaged from hard-Right excrement seen in publications such as McGinley’s Common Sense and Gerald L. K. Smith's Cross and Flag. A plethora of antisemitism, racism, xenophobia, and conspiracism was produced by or explicitly associated with the Birchers. More than a little of it eventually became staple fair for the alt-right and QAnon movements of today. RNAD was incorporated in their calls for the suppression of those daring to demand their votes matter as much as white men’s.
As well, the John Birch Society (JBS) was already notorious for being fascist-adjacent during its inaugural years. Revilo Oliver's 1959 book ALL America Must Know the Terror That is Upon Us is a short screed exposing an imagined nefarious overseas-born, underway since the 1870s, to import communism under the guise of “social reform” and “democracy” in order to destroy the Republic. As a co-founder of the JBS and profuse pseudo-academic & writer, Oliver helped set the tone for the group of curmudgeonous middle-aged white men and their fellow-travelers. In addition to founding the group’s American Opinion, he also co-founded National Review, the leading journal of “mature & respectable conservative ideas”, which shared many writers and financial backers like their far-Right buddy Mr. Manion and a whole clown-car loaded with others of even Right-er persuasions.
Oliver's most memorable contributions were to the white supremacist movement after embarrassing Welch by publicly squawking the quiet parts out loud that the world’s troubles would end if “all Jews were vaporized at dawn tomorrow” along with the “Illuminati” and “Bolsheviks,” he resigned from the JBS to mentor and collaborate with fellow JBS members William Luther Pierce, Kevin Strom, and Willis Allison Carto to form the proudly neo-Nazi National Youth Alliance and National Alliance. He soon became an influential promoter of the Christian Identity movement, where the Bircher’s “we’re a republic, not a democracy” was also a customary idiom. Under the pen-names “Ralph Perrier” & “Paul Knutson,” he regularly wrote for Liberty Bell, a sister magazine to the White Power Report. Both were published by George P. Dietz, also a brief JBS member and the American neo-Nazi movement’s internet pioneer, whose “Liberty Bell Network” in turn inspired other online white supremacist forums like Louis Beam’s “Aryan Nations Liberty Net,” Tom Metzger’s “White Aryan Resistance Computer Terminal,” and Dan Black’s “Stormfront” (which is still very much up & running to this day). So naturally the RNAD canard appeared in the Liberty Bell from time to time as well.
In 1965, Willis Carto’s Noontide Press published a short book entitled “This is A Republic, Not a Democracy! (Let's Keep It That Way)” by “Edward Langford”, a pen-name of racialist anthropologist and neo-Nazi Roger Pearson, to put on lily-white reading lists. Pearson, another one of the original Birchers, was supported by the Pioneer Fund (a white supremacist grant organization pushing eugenics & racist pseudoscience) and edited their Mankind Quarterly magazine, went on to edit & write for the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, machinated with literal Nazis as leading chairman of the World Anti-Communist League, and had boasted about helping hide Josef Mengele after the war. Pearson dedicated his book to the JBS's most famed co-founder, Robert Welch, for “popularizing the slogan”.
The book was fundamentally a replication of decades old “white replacement” literature by eugenicists Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, who had inspired some of the most racist U.S. and German laws in the first half of the 20th century. Pearson theorized that democracy only works in homogeneous purely White nations because other races were simply too feeble and inherently unequal to not reduce it to uncut chaos. So America's “Nordic White founding fathers” opted for a republic. But supposedly “the real Communism is race-mixing, race-leveling” and “the destruction of our Western civilization in its entirety”. Pearson praised Welch for bringing all this to the public's attention and lays bare why the Bircher's were so pro-segregationist, anti-democratic, and such fervent boosters of the white genocide conspiracy theory...
Links to recordings of Dan Smoot Report’s 1966 “A Republic, Not A Democracy” television broadcast pop up here & there on social media, , posted by oddballs who think a mouthpiece for segregationists and extremely racist political campaigns dressed up in a suit would somehow make believable “constitutionalist” arguments for scaling back voting & civil rights. Smoot was a legalese-speaking Bircher trying to convince Sunday afternoon TV-watchers in conservative-friendly regions that, starting with the Fourteenth, any Constitutional amendments concerning civil or voting rights were illegal, had never actually been passed, and every subsequent amendment was transforming the sacred republic into a democratic welfare-state that the Founders knew would lead to the destruction of “liberty.” The print version of Smoot’s “Reports” were predominantly homilies about desegregation being part of a long-game communist plot to turn the South into a “negro Soviet Republic” under the guise of “democracy.” Again, totally run-of-the-mill platitudinous stuff that totally never gets old (/s).
As half-ass as they were, the John Birch Society’s attempts to keep the extremism under wraps were repeatedly hampered by its membership and public support of segregationists like George Wallace. Fred Koch, one of the Bircher’s original eleven, built an oil empire off of constructing refineries for the Soviet Union and Nazi-Germany’s Luftwaffe. By 1938, Fred believed “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan,” and after helping found/fund the JBS, he wrote, “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America” and “will use the colored people by getting a vicious race war started.” The Birchers maintained lightly concealed associations with hate groups, like the KKK and the White Citizens Councils (which morphed into the like-minded Council of Conservative Citizens in the 1980s), who would share & sell JBS publications at meetings. Damning caveats came in the form of colorful comments from well-known extremists, such as American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell:
Incidentally, Rockwell also borrowed the RNAD expression to rage in the pages of his own Mein Kampf rendering, This Time The World, that “our nation is supposed to be a Republic, not a Democracy, as pushed by the liberals and pinkos and Jews” in order to install Marxism as part of a strategy to replace White people. This was by far not the first or the last time he used that spiel.
Unfortunately, the Bircher-flavored taint on conservative politics persisted and their populist scaremongering tactics helped usher a B-list actor from California into the White House, an anti-democratic movement named after the Boston Tea Party gain power, and a reality-TV actor who is currently being guided back into office again by JBS-associated think tanks. And apparently the John Birch Society is again being welcomed into the Republican & conservative milieu again after more than half a century in the shadows.
While the JBS can probably be most credited with keeping the RNAD slogan alive, it still remained associated with the edgier grimy corners of the American hard-Right. Rare public appearances were made when Klan-friendly Bircher segregationists would invoke it while loudly whining about minorities & non-conservatives not knowing their place.
In a May 1968 long-winded diatribe recorded in the Congressional Record, decrying protests at Columbia University over the construction of a segregated gym being on public land (after years of West Harlem residents enduring the removal of their homes by the school) and students discovering links between the university and a weapons research think tank involved in the Vietnam War, Representative John Rarick (D-LA) did his part as one of the few Democratic Birchers by sticking to the script:
He then followed with a demand for more police officers to be employed in order to stop an upcoming “Poor People Campaign” march in DC, planned by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the recently assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr.
Rarick was such a beloved conservative that he made the cut for laudation in conservapedia for being ahead of the curve of the modern Republican Party. Quite charming that the site's creators conveniently gloss over his racism and segregationist misadventures with George Wallace's American Independent Party (who also endorsed Trump for president). Or Rarick actively supporting David Duke’s failed 1990 run for US Senator as a Republican.
Corporate needs you to find the differences between Militias and Neonazis
Speaking of the edgier corners of American history, we should probably pick up the pace to run through the remaining decades of the 20th century, when “republic, not a democracy” was almost exclusively used by forces so dark that no dressing them up, even in bleached sheets & spire-topped masks, could render them respectable for any sane society. Granted, that Overton window has been pulling pretty hard to the right for some years, so some of these characters have recently seen their shticks become increasingly mainstreamed with a gobs of assistance from the internet.
It does hit the point home when a former Republican Florida state representative, White Citizens Council organizer, Bircher, Ron Paul supporter, founder of the National White Party and the Church of Creator, white power heavy-hitter Ben Klassen includes invectives like this in his incredibly racist newsletters:
(Acolytes of the Church of the Creator believe that the Jews created Christianity in order to make White people weaker and the first priority should be to “smash the Jewish Behemoth”. They hold even less affectionate opinions of other races and are particularly obsessed with white replacement conspiracy theories)
Another white supremacist “religion,” derived from British-Israelism *(whose members apparently enjoy mentioning RNAD whenever they can)* and reformulated by Klan-supporter, Christian Nationalist Crusader member, and former Pentecostal minister Wesley A. Swift with helpful promotion from the many projects of American Firster Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, was the Christian Identity movement. During the mid-1900s, Swift recorded and shared as many of his sermons as he could to get the wack-job word out about the U.N. instating a “World Government” under the guise of “democracy”. Alternately, the U.S., he demanded, was supposedly intended to be a theocratic nation ran by white Christian men to counter an unholy global menace...
Before his 1970 passing in Mexico as a medical tourist, Swift had successfully built a chain of churches (often taking over already established ones) in at least 7 states. And by the 1990s, there were at least 245 ministers preaching to their Identitarian congregations in over 40 states, the most numerous residing in Missouri. The white supremacist religion was promoted by neo-Nazi movers & shakers like David Duke, Revilo Oliver, Tom Metzger, and Swift’s protege, Richard Butler, who became pastor for the church’s subsequent headquarters, the Aryan Nations compound at Hayden Lake, Idaho. Because their theory of constitutional government was based on the notion that the U.S. was strictly a Christian republic governed by “Christian common law” with the highest authority being the county sheriff, the Identitarian doctrine folded nicely into the ideologies of many militia and Posse Comitatus extremist groups as well.
Swift's unremitting message that the “US Christian Republic” was manifestly not a democracy lived on in the sermons of subsequent ministers. The most vigorous were Michael Hallimore coated his white supremacist Kingdom Identity Ministries flock in Arkansas with. On radio broadcasts, Hallimore would fall back on old Coughlinite and America Firster tropes about democracy being a “globalist” Jewish plot to replace the white race & culture using communism. Alarms were sounded that “the programs of anti-Christ (Jews & Blacks) work continually ... to destroy your race, your culture and your philosophy” in order to make it even spicier for a crowd famously averse to strongly seasoned food…
“Now hear this: ...until we destroy democracy, until we repudiate democracy we will never see the greatness of the Kingdom of God. Oh! you say...that can't be, this is a great democracy. But the Kingdom of God is not a democracy, it is a Sovereignty. It is the one absolute power that shall rule and reign in His Kingdom. His words are law, His government is Law, and even tho we may embrace the concept of a Republic until He whose right it is to Reign does come, we shall then join with Him in a vast Republic for all the earth under the administration of the MOST HIGH GOD, but I am going to tell you that the concept of you as a Great Nation with your race supreme were yours until the twentieth century. They accomplished this by bringing us into great tribulation, and we are still in this great tribulation. For these policies sold into your midst this 'democracy' we are now finding interpreted for us, to be a world democracy in religion and all states of human life and living, and his my friends is a Jew concept. It comes out of the mind of organized Jewry. To do this they must attack your race and your culture, for culture emerges out of a race.”
Kevin Strom, mentee of Bircher and NR-founding neo-Nazi guru Revilo Oliver, similarly argued in a 1977 issue of his National Alliance publication Attack! that “democracy is tantamount to national and racial suicide.” Thusly repeating the claim that democracy leads to the mixing of races and the loss of self-discipline required to maintain national self-sufficiency. Essentially, democracy was irreconcilable with a white-ethnostate striving to be wholly independent from the rest of the world. (FUN FACT: Strom was convicted of possession of child pornography in 2007)
America’s most notorious and influential hate group deserves a brief moment in our spotlight. Having devolved into its most pathetic and perennial incarnation by the mid-1960s, the Third Klan was reduced to a pointy-topped shadow of its former self, broken up into occasionally competing smaller klans scattered throughout the whitest regions of the U.S. With so many other white supremacist groups throughout the land and their well-earned reputation of deplorability, there were numerous other less enormously embarrassing options to team up with if one really needed to stoke up their lily-white outrage. Yet, Ku Klux Klan groups still existed and still pumped out propaganda. In true pale-complected conservative fashion, they stuck with the uninspiring classics:
(yup, you read that right. “We are a republic, not a democracy, but we do democracy like a democracy does.”)
Middle-aged readers likely remember the white supremacist ambiance churning in & out of the Posse Comitatus and “Patriot” militia movements who came out of the woodwork after the fatal bungling of the arrest of an Aryan Nations associate by US Marshals in the northernmost tip of Idaho. The debacle in turn motivated white supremacists to bomb a Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and injuring 680. *(Kathleen Belew's book Bring the War Home is an amazing resource on the militia-meets-RaHoWa NeoNazi connections in the last decades of the 1900s.)* The Turner Diaries, an exceptionally popular book sold at militia-frequented gun shows and far-right assemblies, written by former Bircher and pupil of Revilo Oliver, William Luther Pierce, aided in the persisting of perpetual-white-victimhood and fantasies of a “holy race war”. The story of a guerilla counter-offensive, implemented by white Christian preppers against an army of black soldiers and white liberals controlled by a Jewish world government ending in a purely white-populated earth by 2099, spoke to more than a handful of the militia movement’s “Patriots.”
To aid in radicalizing the rural working class, RNAD was adopted as a mating call for these movements, who often shared memberships with the Klan and Christian Identity movements and their myths of a Semitic globalist conspiracy to destroy their land as they reshaped it into an unChristian democracy.
“We’re a republic, not a democracy” was such a prevalent certitude that an Oregon City-based militia designated themselves the “Republic v. Democracy Redress.” The group initially labelled itself a “think tank” for the Christian Patriot movement in the late 1980s, but its founder, Robert Wangrud, artlessly let the racially obsessed cat out of the bag in interviews with Smoot-ish elegance:
Members of Republic v. Democracy Redress would make the 400 mile trek to meetings at the Aryan Nations' Hayden Lake compound, sometimes showing up in their newsletters to discuss their theory that prior to the 14th Amendment creating a new subordinate citizenship status based on the Social Security scheme, the States had been completely sovereign (a la Calhoun), and white males were intended to be the recipients of complete freedom, and the distributors of restrictive laws for women and non-whites. and White males were intended to be the recipients of complete freedoms and the distributors of restrictive laws to women and non-whites.
While membership of militias & white supremacist groups have waxed & waned since, the internet has been keeping their white-ethnostate wet dreams very much alive. As expected, RNAD shows up regularly in discussion on far-Right forums and rage-baiting whitelash websites. The neo-Nazi Internet forum created in 1990 by “Republican special interest group” leader Dan Black, Stormfront, offers such declarations in the whitest powerest ways one would expect...
Likewise, twenty-first century specters of century-old fascism in the form of pasty boy clubs, like the Patriot Front and their Active Club buddies, subtly propagandize with Silver-Shirt hued phrasing, designating democracy a failure that needs replacing in order to save “our eroding Republic.” Interviews with potential recruits commonly include questions like “When did you realize democracy has its flaws?”
For the most part RNAD has always been relegated to phrasing flung around by ultra-conservatives, the far-Right, and their openly fascist brethren. But the America’s Overton Window has had an especially unsettling slide over the last decade or so. To at least not lose careers over saying the quiet parts out loud, the kinds of conventional policy-makers, figureheads, and their supporters, who used to stay well away from talking points traditionally confined to the extreme perimeters of politics, are now gleefully reinvorgorating the edgier hits that only used to be comfortably blurped out at old Bircher meetings.
In These Modern times...
“We Are a Republic, Not a Democracy” has been a consistent conservative canard since Roosevelt and Truman held the White House. Of course, all political stripes like to complain; but this kind of ireful talk seems to well up in print, TV & radio, podcasts, and social media in times of uninterrupted conservative election losses. And appears less when a winning streak is underway. Coupled with an accelerating rise of heavily funded and influential reactionary groups spun up from a nexus of Libertarian™ and segregationist support from their industrialist and America Firster predecessors, there has been a lot of screeching to go with the revanchist scheming.
The Heritage Foundation, a prominent influential ultraconservative think-tank known for long-gaming dominionist and illiberal political projects seemingly ripped directly from Robert Welch's vision board, publishes “reports” loaded with ramblings regarding “Republic, Not a Democracy” as if it had not already been called out as fascist-adjacent malarkey in the decades before. Borrowing heavily from the tenets of pro-segregationist unabashedly anti-democracy Libertarian™-meets-theocratic-republic Christian Reconstructionism, its co-founders refined their movement to mold opposition to equality & integration into a “Moral Majority” for political potency. Mashing together white-raging Christian fundamentalism with free-market fanaticism, Heritage picked up America First’s story arc to work with some of the same Nazi-fanboys and pro-apartheid freaks associated with preceding fascist movements.
It goes without saying, the New Right's most prolific wedge-issuing organization has never had much qualms with invoking RNAD to make arguments for a conservative state’s right to underrepresent marginalized people in government or to segregate its population. So, of course, they continue to produce RNAD-themed email campaigns and “reports” while quietly creating undemocratic templates for voter suppression laws in GOP-run states.
Their near-indistinguishable associates at the Federalist Society have also gone whole hog pushing “We are a republic, not a democracy” as reason for why Americans should not complain about having their votes not count, either under the electoral college or for their fault of living in a gerrymandered-away district. This bombastic activist organization of “heirs of James Madison's legacy” assembles lists of hyper-conservative judges for Republican presidents to fill vacancies with, whether the candidates are qualified or not. Considering the RNAD-citing protestations made by anti-FDR politicians and segregationists over a presidential overreaching affect on the judicial branch, it is striking to see a groups like this publish books unironically titled Republic Not A Democracy in recent times.
The State Policy Network, a web of Right-wing groups sympathizing with the rudiments of Calhoun's 200-year old arguments, links together the power and funding of organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, along with the model bill writing ALEC and a long list of well-funded Dominionist-meets-Libertarian™ organizations fond of using the “we're just a republic” line of reasoning, SPN aids in giving corporate interests a bigger roll in crafting legislation and rolling back much of America’s labor and civil rights successes over at least the last century or more. (see:this article's backside) Politicians with close ties to these groups, e.g., Mike Lee (R-UT), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Mike Johnson (R-LA), have been heard recently using the RNAD epigram to deflect criticism of a deeply flawed electoral system or to complain about the citizenry voting down invasive & authoritarian laws that hard-Right minority governments have attempted to impose on them.
We are going to add two additional but final drips of unfiltered kookiness into the wacky bucket of cranks. Let us start with the bizarre political cult of the Laroucherites. The chore of comprehensively describing their ideology and history would produce a colossal article in & of itself, but one can get a sense of the vibe in the son of the founder’s 2010 bonkers treatise, “We Are a Republic, Not a Democracy.” This ponzi-flavored fringe political sect has been a prolific publisher of antisemitic and related tin-foil-hatted literature since the early 1970s and could be considered an inspiration for the current “If there is a conspiracy-theory… yo, they’ll adopt it” QAnon movement. From Adolf Hitler being a Manchurian Candidate for a satanic British monarchy to land bridges across oceans to violent anti-union protests to writing reports on Leftist organizations for the FBI and reports on anti-apartheid activists for the South African government to “9/11 was an inside job” to allying with some of the worst neo-Nazi groups listed above to morphing into an über-MAGA fan-club and trolling progressive politicians, there is a heck of a lot of faux-populist nuttiness to process. But in recent years, the rhetoric has been fairly indistinguishable from organizations like the JBS and their State Policy Network successors. Larouchite organizations donating to some of the same lobbyist & activist groups indicates that there may be some kind of toll required in order to use RNAD. Because they certainly do in their weird pro-Trump/anti-British tirades about fantastical “woke” fascist mega-corporations advancing a “tyrannical democracy” in articles like “Wise Up Mr. Biden: America is a Republic, Not a Democracy.”
The last zany dribble we will leave you with has a similar sounding name and whose Mises Institute has had a running beef with the Kochs since Murray and Charles had themselves a falling out in the early 1980s. (at least it still gets that dead oil/klansman Armstrong money) Like Rothbard, Hoppe, Mises, Ron Paul, and others in the “paleolibertarian” milieu, Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s site has been credited by influential alt-Righters as having been their doorway into white nationalism. We could get into this lifelong JBS member's neo-Confederate “race realist” and secessionist views or his years working for Hillsdale College or somehow being an “anarchist” but anti-immigrant and for tightly closed borders or upping the bigotry of Ron Paul's campaign messaging or regularly publishing all sorts of alt-Right characters, but we feel you probably get the drift by now. So alongside his site's racist content laundered as Libertarian™, Lew has kept the Old Right’s Firster themes going by accompanying the New Right’s freemarket-traditionalist-nationalism with plenty of posts promoting RNAD…
It is almost amazing that “we are not a democracy” has become so ingrained in the extreme traditionalist-meets-white supremacist-meets-Libertarian™ corners of the Right, that they cannot get over the semantics long enough to come up with a new argument that people do not immediately recognize as bunkum. Unfortunately, those corners are big enough to have been mainstreamed into some of the institutional Right's most consequential organizations and messaging.
FFor those who have made it this far along in our nearly interminable article, hopefully it has been a memorable ride, to say the very least.
At this point, most of us can acknowledge that “we are a republic, not a democracy” is simply the chorus of a song continually playing on the Right side of America’s political spectrum. Rarely, if ever, is heard in the expanses of Center or Left-leaning politics. Maybe because it is a really awkward phrasal idiom to pair with complaints over the unwonted concept of “direct democracy,” even as “direct democracy” is not even what the rest of the world is talking about whenever “democracy” is alluded to.
When these people are get hairs up over terminology nobody else has been using outside of pedantic footnotes or 235-year-old correspondence between chesty fellas, it makes one really wonder what then do they actually mean by this “republic” that they, at best, define with vaguery and with the pining for an era without running water, internet, paved roads, or suffrage for pretty much anyone except well-off white wearers of wigs.
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Since Publius’ pontificated over his generation’s new confederation being a republic, but not a democracy, rarely has the sentiment been used for honest clarification or to argue for legitimate policy that would affirm the first three words of the U.S. Constitution. Instead, such perfidious platitudes have been adopted and adapted by mostly chalky geneology-obsessed Anglo-Saxon-y prigs to unsubtly justify the opposing of “others” being allowed to have a hand in governing, let alone presence, in a nation that they believe was only theirs to conquer and control.
The 1800s saw RNAD deployed alongside polemics supporting slavery, creating anti-immigration moral panics, and to justify maintaining a white supremacist status quo over actual indigenous people and those who were forcefully imported or immigrated there to make a new life outside of a shambolic Europe. In the first part of the twentieth century plutocratic-minded men invoked the cliché to dismiss long-simmering working class discontent. With the aid of the xenophobic zeitgeist and some esteemed eugenicists (who we will discuss in Part 3 & 4), antisemitism and invigorated bigoted & fascist movements, promoted by some of those same elites, RNAD was handily hitched to fear-mongering and attacks on labor organizing and integration. White supremacist organizations of the last 75 years naturally inherited these sentiments, the members of such groups, and the vague axiom to use in their tantrums over an imagined Jewish cabal ending segregation, imposing communism, and replacing Christian Caucasians through a lattice of increasingly vaguer folk devils they correlated with civil rights, asylum-seekers, Critical Race Theory, “gay agendas,” suffrage, “woke,” and “democracy.”
In our wired-up era, where anyone with internet access could potentially have a voice, talking-heads on satellite radio & cable television, and the online warriors they inspire, have done such a bang up job of normalizing the dog-whistles, it is now a struggle to avoid the piles of overproduced bigotry being flung around every time we open up our handy electronic devices. And as we have learned, much of it is just barely laundered repackaged tropes from the past.
It would be nice to think that all this is just naive historical misinterpretations on their or our parts and we are just looking through a contemporary progressive-shaped lens at a small sample of ignorant or diabolical people claiming that the the U.S. is “a republic, not a democracy.” But if you are still with us and not yet seething over this timeline of its usage, let us all flip over to the backside to continue inundating our brains with context and anecdotes to help us appreciate how the rest of America has, for generations before we were even a twinkle in someones eye, recognized the erroneous “We Are A Republic, Not a Democracy” as just another disingenuous far-Right catchphrase bound with a hardly hidden unscrupulous undercurrent.
that backside: A Brief but Bigoted History of “We’re a Republic, Not a Democracy” (3 of 4): holy moly, there is an even darker back side of this semantic silliness