Yet a common response intended to shut down the glib right-wing “republic not democracy” assertion makes the founders simplistically consistent in the opposite way, as summed up in the law professor and activist Lawrence Lessig’s Medium entry on the subject, posted back in 2016 and recently revived on Twitter:
Yes, it is true, the Framers meant to establish “a Republic.”
And yes, they openly and repeatedly criticized “democracy.”
But the “democracy” they were criticizing was “direct democracy,” and the “Republic” they were championing was “representative democracy.”
Lessig’s claim that when the framers criticized democracy they meant only to criticize direct democracy — holding a popular referendum on every law and issue, with no representative layer — doesn’t stand up to a second’s scrutiny. Of course the framers disliked direct participation and favored representation: they didn’t want the electorate voting to pass and repeal laws; they wanted the electorate voting to choose representatives who would vote on passing and repealing laws. Some of the founders wrote eloquently on the virtues of a representative system: Lessig cites Madison to that effect. And it’s true that Madison and others sometimes explicitly used “democracy,” to refer disparagingly to direct democracy, in contrast to a representative “republic.”
But that was all talk, in the sense that the founders had no experience of direct democracy. They and their ancestors had known only representative legislative bodies. So what they and their ancestors had long argued about, far more than they ever argued about the abstract issue of direct democracy, had to do with the concrete issue of how democratic a representative body should be. And their answer was “not very democratic at all.” Far more often and far more significantly, therefore, the founders used the term “democracy” to refer not to an electorate directly deciding issues but to an electorate made up of too many of the wrong kind of people empowered to choose representatives.
When Edmund Randolph called the constitutional convention to order, he reminded his fellow delegates why they were there: “our chief danger arises,” he said, “from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” He wasn’t talking about some exercise of direct democracy going on in the states. That didn’t exist. He was talking about what he and his colleagues on all sides of a lot of other issues agreed was an excess of, precisely, representative democracy in the states’ elected legislatures. That did exist, and it was freaking the founders out. Hence the constitutional convention.