Why bother? They're all screwing us over.

[merrily]

121. If I am understanding your post, I think

you may be crossing over between "egalitarian" and "democracy." If I am not reading your post correctly, then I you will need to explain your point to me because I am not picking it up on my own.


Aside from traditional monarchies, dictatorships, etc., the Framers had two models from which to begin: Ancient Athens, a democracy, or ancient Rome, a Republic. They chose Rome.

e·gal·i·tar·i·an (-gl-târ-n)
adj.
Affirming, promoting, or characterized by belief in equal political, economic, social, and civil rights for all people.

re·pub·lic (r-pblk)
n.
1.
a. A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president.
b. A nation that has such a political order.
2.
a. A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them.
b. A nation that has such a political order.
3. often Republic A specific republican government of a nation: the Fourth Republic of France.

Athenian democracy developed in the Greek city-state of Athens, comprising the central city-state of Athens and the surrounding territory of Attica, around 550 BC. Athens is one of the first known democracies. Other Greek cities set up democracies, and even though most followed an Athenian model, none was as powerful, stable, or as well-documented as that of Athens.

It remains a unique and intriguing experiment in direct democracy, a political system in which the people do not elect representatives to vote on their behalf but vote on legislation and executive bills in their own right. Participation was by no means open, but the in-group of participants was constituted with no reference to economic class and they participated on a large scale. The public opinion of voters was remarkably influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theatres.[1]

If everyone over a certain age has the right to vote, that is egalitarian. The US was not egalitarian until 1964, when the 24th amendment finally rendered poll taxes unconstitutional. But, becoming more and more egalitarian over the centuries never altered our form of government. We were established as, and remain to this day, a republic.

As my prior post stated, democracy is a form of government in which citizens vote directly on matters, as opposed to voting only for representatives. Democracy is a form of government in which representatives do not exist. People vote for themselves. Who is entitled to be a citizen in any given nation at any given time has nothing to do what form of government that nation has at that moment.

As a separate point though--not having to do with form of government, in Ancient Athens, as in the US after 1964, every adult citizen had the right to vote. However, Athens was picky about who could be a citizen. So, it was a democracy, but not an egalitarian democracy. Up until 1964, we were a republic, but not an egalitarian republic. In 1964, we became an egalitarian republic, at least as far as voting rights.

Like the early US, Ancient Athens had a large group of slaves. So, if you want to focus on percentage of population entitled to vote for some reason, don't compare the US today with an ancient slave nation.

Rather, at least go back to a more comparable time in our own history, when we, too, were selective about who was entitled to vote: I 'm guessing no more than 20% of the total population of the US was entitled to vote then. Not members of First Nations, not slaves, not women, not people who did not own land, not people who did not pay taxes, etc. (Some things varied by state.) But again, who is entitled to vote is a separate matter from what form of government the people have.

A final complication: because dictionaries are revised continually to reflect how a word is used currently, dictionaries today define a democracy in terms of voting for representatives, as well as citizens voting directly on matters like war. A modern dictionary definition simply reflects that people today call almost any form of government in which people vote "a democracy."

So then, we get hybrid terms, like "direct democracy" (technically redundant) vs. "democratic republic" (technically impossible).

However, the Framers would have understood "democracy" as meaning "voting on issues, as in Ancient Athens" and "republic" as meaning voting for representatives, as in Ancient Rome . Whereas, a term like "democratic republic" might have caused them to scratch their wigged heads.

I know it's a lot to take in. And it is also hard to wrap one's mind around because it goes against everything we've been told all our lives and therefore everything we've been saying ourselves all our lives. When I looked into it, I could barely believe my own eyes.