When are people—especially those living in the United States—going to understand that the United States is not a democracy? It is a constitutional republic. Stop repeating that you want democracy. You already have something far more intentional—if you can keep it.

There is no such thing as a good democracy. Democracy is majority rule. It’s two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner. A republic is built on individual rights, rule of law, and limited government—not the mood of the mob.

This sloppy conflation didn’t start by accident. The propaganda push to rebrand the U.S. as a democracy took off in the early 20th century, around the time of Woodrow Wilson. The Committee on Public Information (CPI), established in 1917 under Wilson, aggressively used media and education to frame U.S. involvement in World War I as a fight to “make the world safe for democracy.” That phrase stuck.

It was never about preserving the republic. It was marketing.

Remember, it was Wilson who signed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, handing over monetary control to a private banking cartel. And just a few years later, he imposed the most illegal of violations: the income tax. The IRS was born under his watch.

And if you don’t know anything about the Fed, this is a private bank that prints money out of air. It operates alongside every other central bank under the same model—fractional reserve lending. That means they loan out money they don’t have, backed by nothing but your future labor.

This causes inflation—a silent theft that debases your savings, your wages, your time. It’s an eternal cycle of debt slavery, where you’re taxed on what you earn, what you spend, and what you save—while your money loses value every year by design.

By the way—taxation is theft.

Most so called western democracies embody both republican and democratic elements. That said it seems to me that in general they are more strongly weighted towards being republics than democracies. Actually there are very few countries that have implemented a governance system closed to a true democracy. Switzerland is probably one of the best case to study as well as local governance in the U.S.. For the most part those seem to work quite well. Democratic systems sometime have a bad rap because of the oligarchy claiming that their powers are legitimized through a democratic process but we all know that those processes are often not so democratic if not completely rigged. Hence, I would claim that we still have to see what a truly democratic system would produce.

What would be for you the best example of a failed democracy?

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You’re raising some valid points, but my original post isn’t about comparing global systems. I’m not debating which governments function best. I’m speaking specifically about the United States—and how the word democracy has been misused and rebranded to replace what this country was actually founded on: a constitutional republic.

We don’t hear enough of: “this is good for the Republic.”

We don’t hear enough about individual rights, sound money, or limited government.

Instead, people defend a word that was inserted into the narrative to mislead—right around the same time we handed monetary power to the Fed and moral power to the IRS.

That’s what I’m pointing at.

That’s where I’m coming from.

I’m talking about the United States. Start there.

Right, I mostly agree with this take. It’s definitely misguided to call the US a democracy considering the level of fraud and corruption while the will of the people can’t correct the course of action since there is no functional democratic levers to do so. But again, at the local level, ballot measures are a good exemple of what direct democracies could produce. I guess democratic systems are inherently more functional at a smaller scale than at large scale but this could change with blockchain based technologies that could enable new systems of direct democratic governance at scale.

Yeah, I understand—but I still have a couple of things to say, especially from Hoppe’s perspective:

I agree: democracy inevitably leads to high-time preference, moral decay, and state expansion, because it incentivizes short-term gains for political players who don’t own the capital base. They’re renters of power, not stewards.

In Hoppe’s view, democracy is soft communism—institutionalized looting dressed up as participation.

Now, if we go further back—to The Republic—Plato calls democracy one step before tyranny. Why? Because in a democracy, freedom becomes excess. Everyone demands equality in all things—even between ruler and ruled, wise and ignorant.

The result? Chaos.

And that’s how democracies collapse.

So while new tech might optimize how we vote, it still doesn’t change what we’re voting for—or who ends up holding the leash.

If think the flaws of democratic systems that you point at could be corrected with better system design. For instance, the political class are indeed “renters of power” but the question is why is this allowed in the first place? It’s hard to deconstruct it because it would be up to the political class to do so while it’s in their personal interest not to do so. It’s a design flaw not an issue with the democratic philosophy.

There is a lot of innovative democratic approaches that could be tested. I think the representative democracy approach is mostly flawed because too easily corruptible/blackmailed.

Maybe we should have legislators for specific domain of expertise that would be open to those with qualified credentials that would be overseen by a general chamber composed of regular citizens wanted to be involved in the democratic process.

All participants could be randomly selected rather than elected to ensure fair representation of all opinions and prevent a corrupted media system from influencing the outcome. There wouldn’t even be a need for campaigning. No more political elections needed.

Instead of participating in electing representatives, citizens would have the power to directly revoke selected officials to mitigate blatant abuse of power.

These are just some ideas to show that the criticism of the democratic governance mostly target flaws in the design rather than the philosophy.

Well, I can see your point. But I always go back to basics—first principles. I’ve studied enough to understand the purpose behind things, not just the structures.

Studying common law, saving in Bitcoin, and studying Austrian economics are guiding me by simple principles and virtues. They support my willingness to contribute to an open-market civilization. I don’t have the need to wait or wish for government systems to evolve. My purpose is to stay in alignment—not to ask for permission.

That said, I still believe that understanding the kind of government we have should be a priority—for both kids and adults. If people don’t know what we were meant to be, they’ll never notice how far we’ve drifted.

So sure—test ideas, experiment with governance models. But for me, it’s about embodying my freedom, not designing better cages.

Absolutely and I don’t see both approaches as incompatible even if they can be in conflict. There will always be free markets and there will always be a structure of governance. I like the idea of having no government or rather governance but, it won’t happen because the void will always be filled by some sort of governance hence, it’s important that we have the best governance possible but not everybody is interested in taking part in the process and that’s totally fine.

Great point and lovely conversation thank you