Where the rhetoric came from, a very distinct place, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, in 2020, who is the first known person to tweet "We are a Republic, not a Democracy". Senator Lee, just days before, re-tweeted a quote from a book about The John Birch Society, a radical faction in the postwar conservative movement who helped popularize the “republic versus democracy” distinction in the 1950s and ’60s to oppose the Civil Rights Movement...
That quote: “There is no surer way to destroy our government than to champion legislation under the guise of democracy, which piece by piece undermines the checks and balances of our republic". The John Birch Society got that quote from anti-New Dealer H.W. Prentis who penned it in 1939 in opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal. All of this pointing out, as usual, Republicans love to reuse rhetoric when they feel like a tiny bit of their privilege is slipping away.
When Republicans use democracy in this sense, whether they know it or not, they are referring to "pure democracy." But there are over a dozen different democracies if Republicans want to get technical; such as direct democracy, participatory democracy and deliberative democracy just to name a few. Furthermore, no country or major society has used pure democracy since ancient Greece.
DEFINITIONS
Democracy: A form of government where eligible citizens have the right to participate equally, either directly or indirectly through representatives.
(Problem - In Greece "one person one vote" became too tedious and led to mob rule)
Republic: Latin, Res Publica meaning "public thing" translated as commonwealth or state, was something practiced in Rome in the same time period, where they used voting blocks or units. Majority votes in a unit would constitute 1 vote for that unit. The majority of the combined units decided the outcome of an election. It's what our electoral college is directly modeled after. The idea being that the people's will is filtered through representatives to eliminate mob rule, along with a set of rights, aka constitution, to hold everything together.
(Problem - It helped minority groups not get overlooked, but those in higher socioeconomic classes got more voting units believing the masses were too dumb or uneducated to vote).
Federalism: Shared governing between a strong central government. and decentralized states.
Democratic Republic: Combines the principles of democracy; electing representatives through direct voting where, everyone gets a vote, with the structure of a Republic, having a constitution or charter, and other checks on pure majority rule.
SUMMARY
Every country on the planet that has freedoms similar to the U.S. is some form of a Democratic Republic. If you want to get technical the official language used to describe our country's type of government is a "federal constitutional representative democracy" or often the shorter "federal democratic republic". You don't really have to include “constitutional” because it's implied in the word "republic".
It's very common and completely acceptable to use the word "democracy" loosely as an umbrella term for free countries where it's citizens vote for representatives or ballot initiatives and have a voice using free and fair elections. The last 3 Republican presidents before Trump were known for giving fiery speeches laced with phrases like "protecting our democracy", "spreading our democracy," or "we are proud of this democratic nation". Claiming our country is not a democracy, and that it's only a republic, is either lack of understanding of basic civics or an attempt to use a dog whistle, period, full stop.
S. Reiff, September 2024