Former President Donald Trump, we are repeatedly told by President Joe Biden and his campaign surrogates, is a threat to democracy. To help further this talking point, Biden’s allies at CNN recently aired a segment asserting that many Trump supporters don’t believe the United States is a democracy. They believe it is a republic.

“This is not actually a debate about government, about democracy,” CNN intones. “It’s an attack on democracy.”

What nonsense! The U.S. is both — a constitutional republic and democratic. The people pushing to undo the republican elements of our government are the real threat to the Constitution.

“Democracy” and “republic” are often used interchangeably or in antithesis. A constitutional republic is a democratic form of government. But to the extent that democracies and republics are different, and they are, the authors of our Constitution most assuredly wanted to ensure that the country they were creating was a republic and not merely a democracy.

“Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10.

The danger of unbridled democracy, as Madison explained during debate at the Constitutional Convention, was the unchecked rule of a majority. “Where a majority are united by a common sentiment and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure,” he said in 1787.

To protect against mob rule, the authors of the Constitution deliberately put in republican checks on majoritarian power, spreading authority across branches of government and to the states. These designs included the coequal branches of government, including the Supreme Court, federalism and the Electoral College, and a Senate in which all states were treated equally regardless of size.

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When looking at the two parties today, it is abundantly evident which one is actively trying to undermine every republican protection the founders created to thwart the tyranny of majority rule. It is the Democrats who are attacking the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and threatening to pack it with ideological left-wingers unless current justices bend to majoritarian will. It is the Democratic Party that is actively campaigning to do away with the Electoral College and abolish the Senate. 

Partisans on both sides are prone to hyperbole in an election year, and the stakes this year seem high. But it generally seems that way every four years, and both sides repeatedly tell us it is the most important election of our lifetimes. It would be an overstatement to say the future of “democracy” or the “republic” hinged on any one election. But to the extent that each election pushes in one direction or the other, it is clear which party stands for another step toward tyrannical majoritarian rule and which party represents a restoration of the republic that the founders intended.