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The Pledge Of Allegiance Summary

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The Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase "and to the republic for which it stands" and according to This Nation.com the United States is, undeniably, a republic, not a democracy.
A democracy, defined correctly “is a form of government in which the people decide policy matters directly--through town hall meetings or by voting on ballot initiatives and referendums”. A republic “is a system in which the people choose representatives who, in turn, make policy decisions on their behalf. Everything our forefathers studied raised fear and revealed that pure democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths".
The word democracy is used today to describe governments that derive power from citizens and are held accountable to those citizens when using that power. Utilizing modern usage of the term, the United States can be described as a democracy and even though there are examples of "pure democracy" to be found, for example, state ballots containing policy questions that are directly decided by popular vote, the U.S. Constitution does not allow national ballot referendums or initiatives because those that framed it were opposed to the idea and were not comfortable with common …show more content…

According to writer, James Mott’s Is the United States a Democracy?, “In the strictest sense of the word, the system of government established by the Constitution was never intended to be a "democracy” This is evident not only in the wording of the Pledge of Allegiance but in the Constitution itself which declares that "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government" Moreover, the scheme of representation and the various mechanisms for selecting representatives established by the Constitution were clearly intended to produce a republic, not a

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