United States Was Founded as a Constitutional Republic and Not a Democracy Nov 03, 2008 - By: Ayn_Rand

Contrary to popular rhetoric, America was founded, not as a “democracy,” but as a constitutional republic--a political structure under which the government is bound by a written constitution to the task of protecting individual rights. “Democracy” does not mean a system that holds public elections for government officials; it means a system in which a majority vote rules everything and everyone, and in which the individual thus has no rights. In a democracy, observed James Madison in The Federalist Papers , “there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention [and] have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.”