Republics may or may not be democratic. They may be more or less democratic. They are not monarchies, although monarchies may be democratic. My father delighted in telling people (often me) that the United States was not a true democracy. He considered true democracies to be governments ruled by mobs of the ignorant. He said that the United States was a federal republic with a limited form of democracy. For him the constitution of the United States was the bulwark of this federal republic against mob rule. On this, he and I are still in agreement although he is long gone.
We have always had a certain element in the population who want unlimited democracy in the US, a democracy run on the basis of an even more generous franchise, abolition of the electoral college, reduction of the state governments to administrative districts along the line of French departments, one law code for the whole country, and allocation of senators by state population size.
The 24/7 news media are in favor of most or all of these things. Their incessant and usually mindless propaganda for their favorite "hobby horses," drives the ignorant sheeple toward the slaughter pens set up on electoral days. The advertising industry functions in this process in the same way that sheep dogs move the mutton toward the knife.
The American people (if there is such a thing) have been endlessly dumbed-down in schools where "all the children are exceptional" except for the truly exceptional who attend different schools that are either private or resident within public schools. The rest have grown to something called adulthood on a diet of; action movies, reality TV, social media half thoughts, hip-hop, etc. As a result the average potential elector has almost no span of attention, little knowledge of anything but the trivia of their daily lives and an inability to find almost anything on a map.
These people are ripe for exploitation by a regime that could be modeled on Orwell's "1984." (He was a British author who lived in the 20th Century)
We no longer deserve a republic. IMO an election in which Romney wins the national popular vote and BHO the electoral college would be intensely entertaining. We had that in 2000 until SCOTUS spoiled the fun. Pete Williams, the NBC courts reporter correctly says that such a thing would not be a "constitutional crisis." It would simply be the system at work. pl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_presidential_candidates,_2012
