Don't get your feelings hurt because you came with weak sauce. A puff piece from the Washington Post is not a definition. It is an opinion.

Buck up snowflake.

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Posted by inadaze

Member since Aug 2010

4865 posts

Posted on 11/19/16 at 1:16 am to Wolfhound45

quote:
not a definition

Did you not read the article?
Why do you think what you say about this matters?
Are you not able to access a search engine or a dictionary?

You've established that you idiotically think you're above the Washington Post. Do you also think you're above Merriam-Webster?

quote:
b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

quote:
Is the United States a democracy or a republic?

One of the most commonly encountered questions about the word democracy has nothing to do with its spelling or pronunciation, and isn’t even directly related to the meaning of the word itself. That question is “is the United States a democracy or a republic?” The answer to this, as with so many other questions about meaning, may be phrased as some form of “it depends.”

Some people believe that a country calling itself a democracy must be engaged in direct (or pure) democracy, in which the people of a state or region vote directly for policies, rather than elect representatives who make choices on their behalf. People who follow this line of reasoning hold that the United States is more properly described as a republic, using the following definition of that word: ”a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law.”

However, both democracy and republic have more than a single meaning, and one of the definitions we provide for democracy closely resembles the definition of republic given above: “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”

So if someone asks you if the United States is a democracy or a republic, you may safely answer the question with either “both” or “it depends.”