Last week, Utah senator Mike Lee set off a small controversy with a series of tweets. One simply stated: “We’re not a democracy.” A second added: “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” The final one “clarified” that “[i]t’s a big deal, because in many ways, the whole idea of having a constitution itself, particularly a constitution that establishes a constitutional republic like ours, is materially different and distinct from a democracy.”

Observers rightly saw Lee’s tweets as emblematic of the antidemocratic animus of today’s GOP and conservative movement, whose frequent refrain is that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. Responses to this claim have tended to make two points.

One line of argument suggests that because the founders were explicitly concerned with the institutions of classical Athens, which few are advocating today, invoking their views means using the term “democracy” in a misleading way. While the term has stayed the same, its meaning and context has changed so much in the modern era as to render the founders’ criticisms anachronistic.