Why do conservatives like the idea that the USA is a republic?

[KurtNYC]

Cuba, pre-2003 Iraq and the People's REPUBLIC of China are examples of republics.

Conservatives fear Obama and gun grabbing but in a pure republic Obama would have even more power (?) And just how many guns do the people of China and Cuba have? When Bush was president, I understood the conservatives to mean by "republic" that the president should not have to listen to popular will and that voting (by those who disagree with his policies) is just a way to pick the next temporary king. But Obama has been in for 5 years and they are still demanding that we be a pure republic ?!

btw, this issue came up for me in a discussion about the infamous Reagan quote:

Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.
- R Reagan 1981

Which, like most Reagan quotes, sounds nice until you really look at what Reagan did. Reagan was a fantastic salesman and he worked through the end of his life for the biggest military contractor in the world so what he is selling in this quote is the idea that government should spend more on military hardware than it spends on anything else...well, mission accomplished! But conservatives love the last 4 words (in theory only). "Protecting people" is an excuse to "run their lives." And if you read the quote another way, Reagan is not saying that government should not run people's lives, only that running their lives is somewhere down the list with big military being #1 on it. To confuse matters more, Reagan was the 6 time president of the largest union in Hollywood and he was speaking at a AFL-CIO function when he said this. Reagan also said:

By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights—the right to belong to a free trade union.
- R. Reagan 10/1982

Reagan and "republic" seem odd heroes for people who hate unions and autocratic governments.

[LaydeeBug]

1. because it's the root word of "Republican" and gives them a sense of superiority over Democrats

which is why they salivate when anyone says, "This is a democracy".

[blm]

2. To be accurate, the US has always been governed as a hybrid - a democratic republic.

.

[KurtNYC]

7. I'm sure that's it.

It's just that simple. And they did salivate (and hit the caps lock).

[Aristus]

3. I'm sure for most of the thundering morons in the Republican Party,

their devotion to the term 'republic' goes no further than the tie to the name of their party. Which is essentially meaningless.

Technically, we are a republic. We are a democratic republic, so one could argue that if a resemblance in nomenclature is the same as loyalty to the ideals of one's nation, then Democrats should be the pre-eminent patriots.

But as I said, our parties' names are essentially meaningless. These are the names because political parties have to have names.

And you could point out to any "We are a republic" conservatives these points:

Pre-Augustan Rome was a Republic, but it wasn't a democracy.

Modern Great Britain is a democracy, but it is not a republic.

[Recursion]

9. Yeah; "republic" and "democracy" are not contradictory

Being a republic means your head of state is not a monarch. Being a democracy means the legitimacy of the government comes from the people. The first is a fairly simple technical definition, the second is a bit subjective, but they don't contradict each other at all.

[Bok_Tukalo]

4. Because we are a republic?

Just a guess.

[Steepler0t]

5. Representative Constitutional Democratic Republic

On a first-past-the-post Jeffersonian tip.

[siligut]

6. Possibly due to Plato's Republic?

Conservatives have a penchant for trying to model society through historical writings. I am actually serious, the conservative thought I was exposed to leads me to believe that they like having the rules laid out by an authority. And as you demonstrate, it all sounds great until it is put into practice, which not surprisingly is the scholarly criticism of Plato's best know work.

[Recursion]

8. Reagan was our only President to have been a union organizer

Crazily, he got PATCO's endorsement in 1980 because Carter had done so much airline deregulation.