The Long, Slow Trek to Insurrection

I first started hearing it in 2003 or 2004. For quite a while I didn’t give it a second thought, and wasn’t moved to write about it until 2008. Looking back on it, I should have put two and two together, should’ve seen it as a shot across the bow, the first battering ram to the barricades. I did not.

It’s been close to 20 years since someone told me for the first time that America is a republic, not a democracy. I was leading the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign at the time and the man on the other end of the phone indignantly insisted that I should change the group’s name because it implied we were working for something that had never existed in our country and should never come to pass. I got another such call, and another. I started getting emails saying the same thing, and handwritten letters delivered the old-fashioned way with the same basic message. America is not a democracy and never has been.

I stood my ground, arguing gamely that a republic is but a representative democracy. They…