How segregationist hacks commemorate the American Revolution

This is a bit of highbrow hackery about the American Revolution, from Bradley Birzer of the famously rightwing Hillsdale College.

Some of his talks about the politics of the American Revolution and the early Republic is just dumb but vague pablum delivered in a “highbrow” tone. After 25:00 in the video, he hauls out the rightwing trope, beloved by segregationists, that the Founders favored a republic which they thought was something radically different from democracy, the latter of which they supposedly hated.

And it’s the same old hack segregationist nonsense it always was. This is more than enough to be extremely cautious about his interpretations and formulations.

Mike Caulfield takes a look at the background of this segregationist trope and explains:

It was of course popularized by the John Birch Society Blue Book, where it was a central tenet that democracy was a scam by which majoritarian rule would lead to the collapse of Western Civilization.

But underneath it all is the idea that majority rule would lead to social welfare policies and racial integration. And more specifically, there is a panic that over time demographic shifts will be against them and those groups might wield power in ways that they have in the past. (2)

John Micek quotes George Thomas, who calls the trope “a dangerous and wrong argument.”

“Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it,” Thomas argues, pointing to such Republicans as U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, of Utah, who have been trotting out this corrosive chestnut as a way to justify the limited kind of political participation envisioned by the current incarnation of the GOP.

“The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called ‘pure’ democracy and defended the American experiment as ‘wholly republican,'” Thomas writes. “To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic, was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. It misses, too, how we understand the idea of democracy today.”

He pointed out that President Abraham Lincoln, whom Republicans like to embrace when it’s convenient, “used constitutional republic and democracy synonymously, eloquently casting the American experiment as government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And whatever the complexities of American constitutional design, Lincoln insisted, ‘the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible.’” (3)

I also like to recall the 1790s, when the John Adams’ Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans became the two dominant parties in American politics. Many conservative-leaning Federalists were so horrified at the excesses of the French Revolution that they identified democracy with the most repressive French Revolutionary governments. So they decided that they would start calling the Republicans “democrats” to smear them.

The Jeffersonians reacted to that polemical move by … changing their name to the Democratic-Republican Party. They thought they sounded pretty good! That party would dominate national politics from the first four decades of the 19th century. Until 1824, they mainly still used the name Republicans in campaigning, and Democrats after that.

So apparently not a whole lot of Americans in those days thought “democracy” was a dirty word! (4)

Birzer does talk about the significance of the cotton gin for slavery. As an explanation from the National Park Service puts it, “An unforeseen byproduct of Whitney's invention, a labor-saving device, was to help preserve the institution of slavery in the South by making cotton production highly profitable.” (5)

But he does so in a way that minimizes the ugliness of the institution of slavery pre-cotton-gin. And Southern slavery was not just an unfortunate by-product of an advance in technology. It was a human institution and one that inevitably would poison a democracy.

Lyn Martin gives a more complete version of the point:

It is impossible to remember Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin without also recognizing his contribution to antebellum slavery in the United States. His legacy therefore, will always be tarnished with his impact on slavery.

However, it is important to note that Whitney also figured out how to manufacture muskets by using a machine method, making the parts interchangeable. This technique also proved to be revolutionary, allowing for the mass production of muskets beginning in 1798. (6)

Birzer also makes a hack argument about early US imperialism in the video which is so lame I won’t bother to repeat it here.

But rightwing tropes seem never to fade out completely. And the republic-not-a-democracy one will probably get more of a workout than usual over the next couple of months with the publicity about the 250th anniversary of the Revolution.

I also discussed this segregationist nonsense in two posts, The “America-is-a-republic-not-a-democracy” trope and Once again on the republic-not-a-democracy nonsense. The former also discusses a particular vintage-1965 version of the argument by a professor, Willmoore Kendall, which is a painful 14 pages to read!

Notes:

(1) Book Talk | The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty. Quincy Institute YouTube channel 05/28/2026. <https://www.youtube.com/live/qAxrnTVQh8E?si=0tgKfJq88ZK0r-Xz> (Accessed: 2026-28-05). This is a reminder that the Quincy Institute does have some conservative-libertarians featured, though it stress the “restrainer” foreign policy position which is not exclusively associated with the left, right, or even the center.

(2) Caulfield, Mike (): Where “A Republic, not a Democracy” Came From. Medium 03/06/2021. <https://medium.com/@holden/where-a-republic-not-a-democracy-came-from-67853e9c1375> (Accessed: 2026-30-05).

(3) Micek, John (2021): ‘We’re a republic not a democracy’: Here’s what’s so undemocratic about this GOP talking point. Pennsylvania Capital-Star 05/20/2021. <https://penncapital-star.com/commentary/were-a-republic-not-a-democracy-heres-whats-so-undemocratic-about-this-gop-talking-point-john-l-micek/> (Accessed: 2026-30-05).

(5) Eli Whitney. National Park Service n/d. <https://www.nps.gov/people/eli-whitney.htm> (Accessed: 2026-28-05).

(6) Lyn Martin (2020): Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin – A Mixed Legacy. Freedom Center Voices 12/09/2020. <https://freedomcenter.org/voice/eli-whitney-cotton-gin/> (Accessed: 2026-31-05).