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tavavexyesterday at 6:31 PM2 repliesview on HN

> It's a Constitutional Republic.

Which is a kind of democracy. Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people. This is a weird framing that I see brought up by Americans only, and I don't understand it, because direct democracies (what these Americans are actually referring to when they say 'democracy') are basically extinct in the modern world. They keep trying to distance themselves from the term. Most democratic nations today are presidential or parliamentary republics, just like you, or something that can be approximated to one of them. I'm doubtful that the US founders didn't recognize they were founding a democratic nation, just a specific subcategory - but ultimately still a state that should hopefully answer to the people.

Neither does federalism relate to the form of government - you could have a federal or distributed direct democracy if you wanted to. They're just different categories of things, the way you choose how to best represent the will of a group of people is a different question from how you subdivide these groups into self-governing blocks.


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andrewlayesterday at 7:02 PM

But Adams was specifically arguing not against democracy in the broad term, but specifically, unconstrained direct democracy, so this is not relevant to this discussion.

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abernard1yesterday at 7:03 PM

> Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people

No. It's not. I encourage you to read the quite enlightening treatment of democracies in the Federalist Papers. And Greece's government was nothing like Rome. If there is a conflation there, it is one largely created by America.

Which in its own right is interesting. What is interesting about the longest-running continuous constitutional government in history (America)?

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