Tennessee WordSmith: A Liberal Dose, June 6, 2025 "A Brief History of Democracy, part 1"

A Liberal Dose

A Very Brief History of Democracy, Part 1

Troy D. Smith

I’m going to step away for a moment from my weekly monologue about how Trump is ruining the economy and address a specific question someone asked me. There is a meme going around social media saying, in effect, the U.S. has never been a democracy but is instead a constitutional republic, designed to protect common folk from being ruled by a tyrannical elite. The quote on that meme is actually pulled, out of context, from a long Facebook rant by an ultra-libertarian, anti-vax, Jews-are-secretly-running-the-world conspiracy theorist. That information provides a lot of context. However, the stark divide in the comparison reminds me of something else I’ve been hearing for about a decade now from conservative friends: “America is not a democracy, it is a republic.” While all the statements I have quoted are true on some levels, the framing of them in the context used by people citing them is “Democrats are bad.” In the latter case the contrast is offered that “Republicans are good.” The ultra-libertarian view is that both parties, and indeed the very concept of parties, or of government, is evil. Either way, I realize that most folks have never done a deep-dive into democracy (or populism), and can find these sorts of random quotes, when pulled out of context, confusing.

So I’m going to talk, in the 500 words I have remaining, about Democracy in America (a full discussion might take more like 500 pages!). This is especially appropriate as today, June 6, is the anniversary of one of the largest defenses of democracy in history.

First, let’s look at the word and the concept themselves. “Democracy” is from a Greek word meaning “rule by the common people” -demos. In ancient (and/or classical) Greece, city-states like Athens were run this way: major decisions were made by a vote of all adult male citizens (of course, slaves were left out of the decision-making process, and so were women for the most part). We still see a form of this every once in a while when there is a referendum -an issue voted on by every voter in a county, or a state. That differs from a representational democracy, in which voters elect someone to represent their town, district, state, etc. in a larger voting body that makes decisions, which is what we have in the U.S. (except for those occasional referendums).

Here's something many of you probably didn’t know, because you don’t see it in pop culture representations. The vast majority of indigenous North American tribes were democracies, probably more than 95% of them (I can name some of the exceptions). Every indigenous village or town (among that 95+%) had elected, nonhereditary, leaders who served as peace chiefs (diplomats), war chiefs (military leaders), or on the tribal council. However, very often, really big decisions were made by referendum- a vote of all adult members of the tribe (usually including women). The Iroquois actually had a representative democracy centuries before Europeans arrived on the continent. There were five Iroquois Nations -later six -the Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Cayuga, and Onondaga (and later Tuscarora) nations, who all formed together into a confederacy. Each town elected representatives to speak for them at the national council (Mohawk, for example), while each nation elected people to represent their nation on the grand council of the confederacy.

Most of the “Founding Fathers” were very well-educated and were very knowledgeable about the democracies of Greece and Rome (which was a democratic republic until the Caesars turned it into an empire, a generation or two before Jesus). They knew the parts that worked, and the parts that didn’t. Some were also familiar -though no one mentioned it in their writings at the time -of the democratic nature of indigenous groups, especially the Iroquois, who were close allies of the British (and therefore of the colonists before the Revolution). They were also very aware of the thoughts of various European philosophers on the subject of government and rights, especially the Englishman John Locke, and their thoughts on government as a social contract between leaders and the governed.

Those Founders, though, were a little divided on where they thought the common people stood. Most believed that “the mob”, or the general public, were too uneducated and emotional to be trusted to make good decisions, and only people (people meaning free adult males) who owned a significant amount of property should be allowed to participate in the process. This included people like John Adams and George Washington, neither of whom trusted “mob action”. For such folks, “democracy” was almost a dirty word, because they equated it with “mob rule”. Others, like Thomas Jefferson and John’s cousin Sam Adams, were very much in favor of the common people and of group protests. When they got together for the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia, they were in agreement they wanted a representative democratic republic, but a balance had to be reached between those fearful of giving the central government too much power, and those afraid of giving the common people too much power. The balance was reached by having one part of Congress, the House of Representatives, being elected directly by the people and the other, the Senate, being appointed by state legislatures (which is how we did it for the first 130 years or so of the U.S.), as well as by the president being elected by the electoral college, not the popular vote.

So that was the situation when the Constitution went into effect in 1788. However, in the 1820s there was a sea change in how people looked at democracy. We’ll look at that next time -depending on the news cycle, who knows what might come up between now and next week.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE