It has constantly annoyed me on /r/politics to see Americans assert that their country is actually not a "democracy" but a "republic". This seems especially prevalent amongst conservatives, constitutionalists and Melvins. (Let's call these people republicans with a small r for the sake of this post.) It also makes no fucking sense at all to a non-American without prior exposure to this asinine argument.
First of all, this nonsense requires a strict interpretation of the word "democracy" to mean rule by majority through direct democracy. By this obtuse definition, there are literally NO democracies in the world larger than some obscure villages and shipwreck victims stranded on deserted island. This is a stupid definition.
In most situations, the word "democracy" refers to some form of representative democracy with legal safeguards and balance of power. For example, the common phrase "Western democracies" would be meaningless otherwise unless this New York Times headline is actually referring to some obscure island in the Pacific Ocean.
In other words, when people, rightfully, say that the US is a "democracy", it is obvious that they mean exactly whatever "democratic constitutional republic" expresses and NOT "a mob of lawless voters with unchecked powers to oppress the minorities" nor a zombie apocalypse.
Secondly, while this anally strict interpretation of the word "democracy" bears some logic behind it, the weirdly specific definition of a "republic" being used by republicans is nowhere close to being an accepted usage amongst the rest of the Anglophone world. Simply put, a republic is simply any country not ruled by a monarch and, if you feel like being more specific, the people presumably maintain some form of power of self determination.
In that vein, you have your democratic republics (i.e. what we call "democracies" and promptly get corrected by an American on the interwebs), your socialist republics, your Islamic republics, your People's Republic of China and whatever. Basically nowhere do we see the any of the meanings republicans attribute to the word "republic" in common accepted usage.
Some republicans go as far as to claim that a "democracy" is antithetical to a "republic", which just completely blows my mind. I guess North Korea had the right idea when they decided to ignore the part of their name that says "democratic"?
I'm actually starting to think that this meaningless attempt to differentiate "democracy" and "republic" (and demonize the former) was started by the sour-grape Republicans (with a capital R) because the Democrats took the better word. (I mean, just compare the phrase "spreading democracy" to "spreading republicanism"...) Sure, there is some historical text written with the republican definitions in mind, but it simply makes no sense to apply them to modern usages. Words change in meaning and can even take on multiple meanings depending on context.
tl;dr: The US is a democracy just as the UK is a democracy. They are called representative democracies. "Republic" is an almost meaningless word and serves only to remind us that the UK has a Queen while the People's Republic of China used to have emperors but now only has stupid pandas.
tl;dr tl;dr: They are two tangentially related parts of the same fucking thing.
