It continues: the preference for "the ignorance of the many over the ignorance of the few", etc. Only in a society and a system which has lost its soul could so many people believe there is a "them" in this equation. The governnment serves at the pleasure of the people and for the people. By the people, even. Sure, a Republican organization of government slows things down (prevents radical, ill-thought-out actions) or it used to. Since the people abandoned all responsibility for the government it elects and quit prodding and poking it, quit being activists and quit watching the store, the "gummint" has chosen to take liberties with the petty cash, the stock and the profits. Now they've changed the locks and the owners feel unable to even get inside. In fact, they've become so ignorant of their assigned role in this sort of government that they don't want to get inside, because then they'd have the tiger by the tail once again, and it's been such a long time...

We can force our government to work for us once again. We've been offered the opportunity by the Democratic candidate to perhaps regain much of the part we were meant to play in this. We can begin by simply unifying and coming to a few simple agreements. We also will have to accept that as owners, as stockholders in this incredible and still fairly young enterprise.

It's not that hard, really. We just need to re-assume our responsibilities, which include truly examining who we vote into office, before we vote. It means becoming a little more knowlegeable and a lot more involved. So we choose people who appear to be better suited to the big job of running the store. So what? They still answer to us unless we let them off the hook. Hell, if anyone could grow up to be President we'd have some marginally retarded buffoon in there, using the Constitution for toilet pa...

Oh. Oh dear. Oh well, it's still not too late.

I would like to add some to the debate over these two terms. As has been pointed out, the terms are essentially the same. For a good rundown, besides the rather long starred comment on this, On Democracy by Robert Dahl is a good place to begin.

The difference between the two, and the insistence that we are a Republic or should be one, stems from right after the revolution (I am basing this on an argument offered by Gordon Wood in "The Radicalism of the American Revolution;" I do not have it on me, but I can provide a citation later if needed). Apparently, many of the founders were a bit unhappy with how the people were using their new found freedom following the Revolution and introduced this nifty rhetorical dichotomy into our political discourse as a tool to discredit their enemies.

Here is the link

That was a brave and quite clear demonstration of the failure of the American people to take adequate interest in and responsibility for (in this instance) the war in Iraq.

From the outset this was plainly (to this writer) a non-starter, and even the dumbest stumpjump out there could at least recognize that what he didn't know outweighed what he did. Unfortunately one of the dumbest faux stumpjumps was already in the Oval Office, which probably made the projection easy and complete. Still, the fact remains it was what we knew we did not know (or manifest ignorance of so many things cited as "fact" without any proofs being offered) that truly buggers the imagination. We knew that we didn't know much, but when the people chose to rally behind Ari Fleischer's explanation that the alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction obviously existed because they'd been moved and were no longer there, even the most clueless hillbilly (and I get to say that because I am descended in great part from clueless hillbillies) might have understood the non sequitur involved, had he chosen.

The people chose the comfort of ignorance, the ignorance which permits revenge, bloodlust, and, yes, the forming of a lynch mob, even if it was led by "them" instead of "us", which I maintain is nothing more than a very convenient lie.

Again, thanks for this. It's a fairly rare occasion and much appreciated.

Wanted to preview, but hit publish, my mistake. I wanted to include the link, but I fear it'll screw up the page.

This passage is from page 16-174, and can be found in Google Books and it is about whether democracy is fundamentally different from republic:

"The correct answer was obfuscated by James Madison in 1787 in an influential paper he wrote to win support for the newly proposed American constitution....Madison distinguished between a "pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person" and a "republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place."

This distinction had no basis in prior history; neither in Rome, nor for example, in Venice was there a "scheme of representation." Indeed, the earlier republics all pretty much fit into Madison's definition of a "democracy." What is more, the two terms were used interchangeably in the United States during the eighteenth century. Nor is Madison's distinction found in a work by the well-known philosopher Montesquieu, whom Madison greatly admired and frequently praised. Madison would hae known that his proposed distinction had no firm historical basis, and so we must conclude that he made it to discredit critics who contended that the proposed constitution was not sufficiently "democratic."

However that may be (the matter is unclear), the plain fact is that the words democracy and republic did not (despite Madison) designate differences in types of popular government. What they reflected, at the cost of later confusion, was a difference between Greek and Latin, the languages from which they came."

Venice did have a legislature/executive split rather like our own, in which there was a lower house and an upper, with the upper composed of elites, but these elites, I do not believe, were representatives as such.