The now-struck provision, which went into effect in May but will cease at the end of August, required employers to give workers one hour of earned paid sick time for every 30 hours worked, and 56 hours (or just seven days) of paid sick time per year. Businesses with fewer than 15 employees were only required to give workers 40 hours per year.Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report discussed this, including a clip of a Missouri state senator Rick Brattin (R) from last November explaining why we shouldn’t have direct-democracy devices like initiatives and referenda. (2) Because, you see, those things are democratic, and democracy is un-American!
In a statement touting how “conservative leadership” supports Missourian “families,” Kehoe called the provision, which would have helped an estimated 728,000 private sector employees in the state, “onerous.” (1)
This is a real throwback to segregationist thinking around after the Supreme Court ordered public school integration in 1954.
Brattin: This is one of those things of the problem with direct democracy. This is exactly what our Founders were expressly against when they formed this nation. We’re a constitutional republic with individual representation confined by Constitutional restraints of what government can and can’t do.[That vote was about requiring employers to pay sick leave, not a complete rewrite of all the laws of Missouri.]
And for us to think that the Founders had in their mind’s eye that we would be putting in front of every single voter and every single time with every single policy measure for them to decide whether or not this was good policy or not.
Especially when the people casting the ballots for measures such as this, they have no skin in the game whatsoever when it comes to these sorts of measures. No realization of the detriment or the harm it may cause to the very own bottom dollar. Because they may not even understand what these provisions, what these measures would do to their employer.This guy sounds like a John Birch Society character circa 1960. Both in the condescending, smarmy tone of his comments and also because he’s promoting one of the Birchers’ favorite notions, one they used in particular to argue against equality for Black citizens and against school integration.
Because at the end of the day, most people casting these votes on these measures, they don’t own businesses. They don’t understand what’s required to keep the bottom line, to keep people employed.
We’re not a direct democracy. And we oughta stop telling our kids that we’re a democracy. First and foremost, ‘cause we’re not a democracy, we’re a republican form of government. We say the pledge every day, we say “to the republic for which it stands,” not “the democracy for which it stands.” And especially not the direct democracy for which it stands.
And people can moan and they can groan, but it’s the ones who moan and groan who probably not the ones signing the front of the checks that employ the people, that are going to have to bear these costs.
But now that the vintage 1950s thinking and attitudes of Trump’s political mentor Roy Cohn dominates the Trumpified Republican Party, it’s worth having at least a passing understanding of this nonsense.
This “we’re a republic not a democracy” trope was adopted by the John Birch Society, which immediately after its founding in 1958 became for years the mothership for crackpot rightwing conspiracies and railing against segregation and everything else they didn’t like as a Communist plot. But it wasn't exclusive to the Birchers.
Before saying a bit more about that, it is important to have a critical attitude toward the lawmaking process, including the particular challenges presented by initiatives and referenda. Those were favorite reform device promoted and widely enacted during the Progressive Era to provide a popular democratic check on corrupt officials and party bosses.
But like every other democratic institution, if Big Money is given free play to influence them, they can also interfere and damage democratic processes and individual rights. If lobbyists can spend unlimited funds campaigning for or against one, they can distort the outcome. And without some reasonable regulation of what they can cover and what not, they can also wind up embedding features into the law that few voters even realized were part of it.
But that’s not what Brattin’s little lesson on Bircher political philosophy was about.
A “republic” but not a “democracy”?
The core of the argument is the ahistorical fantasy that the Founders made some sharp distinction between GOOD republicanism and BAD democracy. It’s nonsense. Democracy was around in ancient Athens and there was such a thing as the Roman Republic. And if you cut and paste enough, you could surely find things said by Americans in speeches or the press in the last three decades of the eighteenth century that refer to the impracticability of having an Athens-style town-meeting direct democracy in a modern nation. And also references to the danger of republics being undermined by strong leaders using plebiscitary methods to undermine the Roman Republic.
Even today, democratic political theory at least pays some attention to the ancient origins of democracy. (3)
During the long period between the Fall of Rome in 476 and the American Revolution of 1776, many governments had come and gone in the European space. There was the Magna Carta of 1215. There were the Italian city-states like those of Genoa and Pisa, also called “communes.” And going into the modern era, there was also the expansion of the formal representation for the nobility and the propertied classes. And some very bloody wars of religion in the 15th and 17th centuries. All of these produced practices and theories of legitimate political representation, limitations on government, and the rights of ordinary people that formed the thought-world of the American Founders.
When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787 to put the theories of Locke and Montesquieu into practice, they understood they were building a democratic republic, i.e., a representative government not controlled by a king or queen that allowed for broad popular representation by the people of the country.
“Broad” in that context meant that free men with some amount of property were allowed to vote. But in the world of 1787, that was seen as radical democracy. (In the US, the reform movement that surged in the 1830s included successful demands to reduce property qualifications for voting.)
But the Americans of that time essentially used the terms “republic” and “democracy” interchangeably. There were republics in the world of 1787 in which royalty had to share power to some real extent with representative bodies elected by wealthy male members of the nobility. And republic was used to refer to a country ruled by some kind of representative body without a king. Even today, the United States has a (momentarily seriously challenged) democracy with no king, and so is known as a republic. Sweden has a strong system of representative democracy but still has a formal royal sovereign, and so it is the Kingdom of Sweden.
What we now know as the liberal democratic tradition sees representative government and the rule of law as intrinsically connected. Rule of law in this concept is not the same as rule by law, which kings and dictators can also use. Representative institutions and individual rights need laws to protect them. But in the democratic perspective, for laws to be legitimate they must also be made by representative institutions.
And there is a continual tension between liberal democracy and capitalism, even though they both developed together. (4) Liberal democracy is not the same as economic liberalism in the sense of “free-market” capitalism. Anarcho-capitalism as practiced by Argentina’s current crackpot government under Javier Milei, or as advocated by the dystopian fantasies of billionaire Tech Bros, is actively hostile to democracy.
Claire Connor wrote an insightful political autobiography chronicling her life growing up in a John Birch Society family, Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right (2013). In it, she describes one of her college professors at the University of Dallas, a rightwinger named Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967), who espoused a version of the republic-not-a-democracy nonsense.
She cites a 1965 paper of his (5) that is basically a “highbrow” polemic in favor of racial segregation, which the Supreme Court had held to be unconstitutional in public schools in 1954. But Southern states were still maintaining segregated schools more than a decade later and waging what they called a “Massive Resistance” (6) campaign to keep them forever.
Such “highbrow” conservative arguments tended to be abstruse, tendentious, pompous, and boring. Kendall’s 1965 article was no exception. He argues, for instance, “’Liberty,’ from moment to moment, will have to mean that amount of ‘liberty’ (or ‘freedom’) that the laws, as legislated under the system, provide for.” Kendall’s approach in that piece seems to be to try to get across the idea that any change in the law to provide more “freedom” - his quotation marks were meant to convey a sneering attitude toward the concept – was inherently unjustified. And also apparently to put his readers to sleep.
How there could have ever been a legitimate American Revolution against Britain under such an understanding is hard to see. In fact, as Connor describes her former professor’s view, he actually wasn’t so hot on this whole American Revolution thing:
Willmoore Kendall used his lectures to drive home one of his core ideas: the Constitution of the United States stood head and shoulders above the Declaration of Independence in importance. He passionately believed that the "all men are created equal" clause from the Declaration was never a defining idea in American governance. In fact, he went so far as to declare the whole business of individual rights and equality to be "false, liberal criteria."This is the kind of stagnant pit of half-baked ideas and sleep-inducing tendentious arguments from which the notion of the US as “a-republic-not-a-democracy” comes. And those ideas and arguments are used to justify the antidemocratic attitudes of authoritarians, white racists, and xenophobes.
Kendall said the defining principle of the United States was "self-government by virtuous people deliberating under God." Those virtuous souls were the ones who spoke in the first three words of the preamble, "We the People." …
Kendall left little doubt that he would have preferred an America governed in the old colonial way. So what if slaves had finally been set free at the cost of a terrible civil war and women had fought 130 years to get the vote? Those good old days when noble white men of high moral principle and great wisdom ruled the country were, in his view, the golden era of the American republic.
In Kendall's political philosophy, demands for individual liberty and equality-including any expansion of voting rights-were radical and dangerous. Ultimately, he reasoned, the pressures of liberty and equality would transform our constitutional government into a totalitarian one. [my emphasis]
Notes:
(1) McCoy, Robert (2025): Republican Governor Overturns Voters and Repeals Paid Sick Leave. New Republic 07/11/2025. <https://newrepublic.com/post/197878/missouri-republican-governor-overturns-voters-repeals-paid-sick-leave> (Accessed: 2025-12-07).
(2) MR Fun 7/11/2025. The Majority Report YouTube channel. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTx62oydWVo&ab_channel=TheMajorityReportw%2FSamSeder> (Accessed: 2025-12-07). Beginning at 1:46:00 in the video.
(3) I heard a scholarly presentation years ago at Santa Clara University in California that saidthat the phrase in the US National Anthem calling the US as “the land of the free and the home of the brave” was taken from a popular play about ancient Sparta, which was assumed to have embodied a strong sense of patriotic public service. But I was unable to confirm that independently while preparing this post.
(4) “Democracy and neoliberal capitalism are two systems that are interconnected, but whose elements require in part different and sometimes contradictory rules.” Metz, Markus & Seeßlen, Georg (2025): Blödmaschinen II: Die Fabrikation der politischen Paranoia, 111. Berlin: Suhrkamp. My translation to English.
(5) Kendall, Willmoore (1965): The Civil Rights Movement and the Coming Constitutional Crisis. The Intercollegiate Review 1:2, 53-66. (02/01/1965). Anyone choosing to read through these 14 pages of turgid prose would be well advised to have an ample supply of coffee on hand.
(6) See: Day, John Kyle (2014): The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
McRae, Elizabeth Gillespie (2018): Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. New York: Oxford University Press.
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