(( That's a misnomer Riccardo - after all, the United States is a liberal democratic republic, and it pretty much invented the usage you are using for the term republic anyway, implying a constitutional democracy. Even if you separate the system inscribed in the Constitution and the accompanying philosophical underpinnings and call all that Liberal Democracy, the idea of calling a republic or a real republic or a constitutional republic a non-monarchy based on constitutional separation of powers as opposed to just an oligarchic non-monarchy like most previous republics prior to the founding of the US, was pretty much just coined - coined really not by the Founding Fathers, as they compared themselves to that oligarchic Roman Republic.
So the idea of the United States' constitutional republican system and ideal underpinnings occupying the long-standing term republic for that specific system is itself a construction that was invented over time to describe the US, or is more of a lazy habit of not wanting to specify and say "liberal democratic constitutional republic" or a "constitutional republic with a liberal democratic constitution".
And especially because the Founders were referring to the dangers of deferring to the state legislatures as "democracy" in the negative, it is both intellectually bankrupt and rather rude and partisan to assert that others are mischaracterizing the U.S. when they refer to it as a democracy as in a liberal democracy, as they are only referring to the institutions explicitly spelled out in the Constitution; as opposed to the idea of popular democracy, which had to develop its own name; or direct democracy, as is the generic intellectual term for what was meant when the Founders decried "democracy" - referring primarily to Athenian democracy, where a simple majority vote could bypass the judiciary if one such was in place at the time for all things, and so forth.
So you see, you just can't spout off things like the U.S. not being a democracy but a republic, in the sense you are using it, in OOC and not be seen as trying to start a fight; because you are deliberately saying something anyone with any basic education in history knows is incorrect in the sense that you are using it.
It's rather infuriating for you, who in character typically drives for the kind of things the Founders meant when they intoned democracy as if it were a curse word, to deliberately turn it around its head and try to use the out of context phrase as an argument against the very system the Founders put in place, liberal democracy.
The sheer objective fact is, the original intention of a majority of the relative Founding Fathers regarding the ratification of the Constitution was that "democracy" in the negative meant letting the states have too much autonomy, letting people exercise too much direct democracy and provincial representative democracy in the state legislatures, and when they said republic they meant letting people vote for representatives on the federal level who would draft legislation and enact it for the whole nation.
So when you use it to mean the exact opposite, and turn what is a neutral objective reality into a partisan point just by the fact that oh if it disagrees with what you are saying it must be a partisan disagreement, you are being incredibly rude and just asking for trouble.
So please refrain from painfully inaccurate hackneyed cliches, in OOC that is. Spout them as much as you want IC ))
