On the Surging Rightwing Claim that America was Never a Democracy

A Portrait of Zooey Zephyr

Wow, rightwing social media bloviators are really going all in on the line that “America isn’t a Democracy! It is a Republic!” Have you seen this?

I try to avoid Twitter as much as possible nowadays. Whole swaths of it used to be pretty dystopian, barely held in check by moderators. There were just some minimal rules—no hate speech, no misgendering trans people, no telling people exactly how you’d like to see them die horribly. Then Elon “I spent billions to be able to misgender my own children online!” Musk bought the place. According to him, banning hate speech is discriminating against Republicans. Evil leftists want to censor and cancel and muzzle people, but the noble right wing understands the incalculable value of there being no rules of civility! The right champions pure free speech!

Tell that to Zooey Zephyr. (I collaborated with AI to make this portrait of her.) This week, Representative Zephyr was banned from the floor of the state legislature of Montana. Supposedly, this was for “violating the rules of decorum.” What did she do? Well, the GOP legislative majority was in the process of ignoring her and all the medical experts, and passing a bunch of laws to ban trans young people from being respected and supported, declaring gender to be a binary determined by sex assigned at birth and gender-affirming care to be illegal. Zephyr stated the representatives voting for these laws had blood on their hands. When this led to a surge of voices from supporters of trans rights in the stands, she held up the mic she was holding. GOP leaders immediately cut the mic and had Zephyr ejected. Then 21 members of the “Montana Freedom Caucus” in the legislature wrote up demands that she be censored for “inappropriate and uncalled-for language”—oh, only they misgendered her throughout the document, calling her “he” and “him.”

So, saying people voting for transphobic bills had blood on their hands, because they were encouraging the high rate of trans youth suicide, was the action that got Zephyr banned. Representing her constituents and engaging in free speech, using a phrase that has been uttered hundreds of times in speeches by people across the political spectrum. And surprise! Rightwing commentators on social media called her an “insurrectionist”, saying her actions were worse than those engaged in by the mob that raided the US Capitol on January 6th of 2021. Because OF COURSE they did, and then did little “gotcha!” happy-dances, as if this ludicrous claim were true. We all know what trolling looks like by now: make outrageous claims, enjoy the outrage of your victims, yadda yadda yadda.

So when someone sent me a link to something on Twitter today, and I looked at my feed, I was unsurprised to see tweets about Zooey Zephyr, and comments on those tweets that misgendered her, called her a “groomer”, said she had created the conditions of her own victimhood because she loves painting herself as a victim, and said her actions had been worse than those of the Jan 6 rioters.

What I didn’t expect to see was this. There were many supporters of Zepher who commented that they feared democracy was dying as Republicans in state legislatures have taken up flat-out expelling marginalized Democrats. One week it’s Tennessee kicking out Black Democrats, and the next it’s Montana kicking out their one trans woman legislator. Agreed! This is not good.

But basically every one of these comments was itself commented upon by a rightwing Twitter culture warrior, who were flocking to these threads about Zooey Zephyr. And they all said some variation of the same thing. “You idiot! America isn’t a democracy! It’s a Republic! The founding fathers hated and opposed democracy. You are so ignorant! You are crying about a myth and deserve to be laughed at.”

Now, the line that “America isn’t a democracy, it’s a republic” isn’t actually new. It’s been circulating around the far right for some years. But wow, it is really having a moment now.

Let’s get this out of the way: the US is a democratic republic. It’s both! A republic is a government in which the government is run by representatives of the people. Those representatives don’t have to be elected, though—being a representative could, for example, be a hereditary position, or one appointed by a religious body. In a democracy, the people govern themselves by voting. Sometimes we do this directly in the US, like when we vote on a referendum. But most of our governing in the US is done by representatives we elect. So: a democratic republic. To all the white men out there right now posting a thousand comments that “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic!” I could just as well say, “You’re not a man, you’re white!” and make just as much sense.

The question is, why are they doing this? 

Well, they say that they are just educating ignorant libs. They want to show us all the comments made by the “founding fathers” about fearing mob rule, and the dangers direct democracy posed to minorities. The commenters’ made-up narrative is that the authors of the Constitution rejected democracy, which equates with mobs, in favor of a republic ruled by Great Men, patriots who could be trusted with the power of government. And there is an element of truth there inasmuch as the “founding fathers” only allowed landowning white men to run for office and vote. But they didn’t “reject democracy”—Jefferson, Adams, etc. spoke about “American democracy” all the time, as well as referring to “our great republic.” They just had a patriarchal, racist, elitist view of who would be allowed to participate in the democracy. 

But you see, that is exactly where the “America was never a democracy!!!” crowd is going with this. Up with the patriarchy, “legacy Americans” (i.e. white people), and an elite that claims to hate elites! Democrats like democracy, eww! [Insert disapproving Drake.] Republicans like a republic! [Insert approving Drake.]

This rhetorical claim that “America was never a democracy” is not expected to actually convince anyone on the left. The aim of it is to convince those on the less radical fringe of the American political right that it is ok to give up on the idea that “the people rule,” and embrace minority rule—so long as it is by patriots, that is, Republicans, as the founders “clearly intended.” Democrats are the mob. So the right should be fine with limiting their ability to have their votes count equally. Gerrymander away! Close polls in urban areas—it’s fine, the mob lives there! Republicans shouldn’t worry about the fact that GOP legislators are turning off the mics of Democratic representatives, and expelling them if they seem annoying. Don’t be concerned about damage to American democracy, because it never existed! It’s a leftist myth! America has always been a republic.

Yuck.

So, I looked at Twitter for ten minutes, and it was depressing, and I closed the app. But I thought I’d let you know what I saw.