You are wrong. America is a democratic-aristocratic-oligarchic republic whose history has consistently pressed for greater democratic equality.
Republics can be almost anything in the world because the classification is based on a single important qualification: the head of state is not a monarch. There is no one true definition of republic.
The American founders created a hybrid democratic-aristocratic-oligarchic republic based quite firmly in Montesquieu's classifications, in that it created what was overwhelmingly an aristocratic-oligarchic republic, built around three administrative federal branches, and incorporated limited democracy for landed persons.
For 223 years, Americans has been hammering out more of the democracy and less of the aristocracy/oligarchy since it was codified in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This in no way changes, nor will it ever change, the classification of America's form of government being a republican one.
You do yourself and everyone else a disservice by exclaiming the US is a republic and not a democracy when
a) the two are not mutually exclusive and the distinction you think exists does not,
2) nobody argues we are a pure democracy--and even if we were, you'd still be hard-pressed to not call such a thing a republic in the modern (and possibly classical) sense, and
d) both classical and modern definitions of democracy and republic share intertwined concepts and throwbacks, while still being disputed by some scholars as to whether they even form a historical continuum at all.
Statements like this are fodder for bumper stickers, not thoughtful discussions.
Republics can be almost anything in the world because the classification is based on a single important qualification: the head of state is not a monarch. There is no one true definition of republic.
The American founders created a hybrid democratic-aristocratic-oligarchic republic based quite firmly in Montesquieu's classifications, in that it created what was overwhelmingly an aristocratic-oligarchic republic, built around three administrative federal branches, and incorporated limited democracy for landed persons.
For 223 years, Americans has been hammering out more of the democracy and less of the aristocracy/oligarchy since it was codified in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This in no way changes, nor will it ever change, the classification of America's form of government being a republican one.
You do yourself and everyone else a disservice by exclaiming the US is a republic and not a democracy when
a) the two are not mutually exclusive and the distinction you think exists does not, 2) nobody argues we are a pure democracy--and even if we were, you'd still be hard-pressed to not call such a thing a republic in the modern (and possibly classical) sense, and d) both classical and modern definitions of democracy and republic share intertwined concepts and throwbacks, while still being disputed by some scholars as to whether they even form a historical continuum at all.
Statements like this are fodder for bumper stickers, not thoughtful discussions.