I’m almost 50. I said the pledge of allegiance every day. Our education system is so messed up that they didn’t bother to explain what it meant.
Hell, I’m old enough that I also sang ‘Zippity Doo Dah ‘ every day also. Plus, we had the strap in school. Teachers and principals taking their anger out on 10 years olds. That was weird.
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In a pure or direct democracy, laws are made directly by popular vote. This is rare today, although it still exists in Lichtenstein, some parts of Switzerland, and some towns in New England. Many countries also have a system for creating referendums on specific issues that are then decided by a popular vote.
Most of today’s democracies are representative democracies, meaning that democratically elected officials pass and enforce laws. This is also known as a republic.
That said, not all republics are perfectly democratic. The United States is not perfectly democratic, for example, because each state elects two Senators no matter what the population of the state might be.
Voter suppression might make a state or country even less democratic. If only property owners or men or whites can vote, those restrictions make the republic less democratic.
Recently many Republicans in the U.S. have justified voter suppression by saying the U.S. is a republic and not a democracy. This repudiation of democratic principles is very strange. While it’s true that the U.S. has never been a perfect democracy, the trend has been for it to grow more democratic rather than less. But now it seems some Republicans are openly hoping to reverse that trend, and make it less democratic.
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