THE SACRALIZATION OF “DEMOCRACY” TURNED A CONTESTED CLASSICAL REGIME-TYPE into an almost unquestionable moral absolute, and that elevation functions as a Trojan horse. Its sacralization as the supreme and nearly unassailable name for legitimate government produced a cascade of institutional, intellectual, cultural, and historical consequences that proved devastating to the classical republican project of non-domination. Once “democracy” became the sole legitimate name for free government, it became possible for populists, far-right ethno-nationalists, authoritarian strongmen, and socialists of every stripe to enter the citadel of free government under false colors. At the same time, the older language of republicanism of mixed constitution, civic virtue, rule of law, and tempered popular sovereignty was progressively emptied of prestige, narrowed to partisan usage, or actively demonized as elitist, outdated, or anti-popular. The result was not the perfection of self-government but the systematic weakening of the very restraints that had once distinguished a free people from a mobilized mass.
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INSTITUTIONAL EROSION AND THE COLLAPSE OF MIXED GOVERNMENT
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The most immediate consequence was the progressive dismantling of the mixed and balanced constitution that classical and Atlantic republicans regarded as the only durable barrier against arbitrary power. When democracy is sacralized, every institutional filter of representation, bicameralism, judicial review, federalism, independent civil service, or super-majority requirements can be portrayed as an undemocratic obstacle to the pure will of the people (Madison 1787; Manin 1997). Populist leaders on both left and right have repeatedly used this rhetoric to justify the packing of courts, the politicization of electoral administration, the centralization of emergency powers, and the subordination of intermediate bodies.
In the interwar period the same dynamic helped destroy the Weimar Republic and the Spanish Second Republic: mass parties claiming to embody authentic democracy treated constitutional limits as bourgeois relics, opening the door first to polarization and then to authoritarian closure (Linz 2000). In the postwar “people’s democracies” of Eastern Europe, formal democratic institutions were retained as façades while real power was monopolized by the party; the sacralized word made it possible to brand any defense of genuine constitutionalism as reactionary or fascist (Arendt 1951). Contemporary populist experiments, whether left-wing Bolivarian regimes or right-wing illiberal democracies, repeat the pattern: democracy is invoked to legitimize the erosion of the very checks that prevent majority or leader domination (Müller 2016; Urbinati 2014).
In the classical and early-modern republican tradition the two terms (republic and democracy) were not synonyms. A pure democracy meant direct rule by the assembled people (or a simple numerical majority). Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, and later Machiavelli and the Atlantic republicans regarded it as unstable: prone to demagoguery, faction, and rapid degeneration into tyranny. A republic (res publica) was a mixed and tempered constitution that combined popular participation with institutional restraints (representation, separation of powers, rule of law, and the cultivation of civic virtue) so that no single element (the one, the few, or the many) could dominate arbitrarily.
The American Founders inherited this distinction. James Madison explicitly preferred a republic to a pure democracy precisely because the extended sphere and representative filters control the violence of faction. “Democracy” in their usage often carried a pejorative or at least cautious tone. Mazzini, while far more populist in spirit, still grounded popular sovereignty inside a moral and national republic of duties, not inside an unmediated popular will.
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HOW “DEMOCRACY” BECAME SACRED: INTELLECTUAL IMPOVERISHMENT AND THE LOSS OF CRITICAL VOCABULARY
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Several historical currents fused to sacralize the term:
- Nineteenth-century democratic movements and the expansion of suffrage gradually equated legitimacy with majority will.
- Woodrow Wilson’s World War I rhetoric (“make the world safe for democracy”) elevated the word into a civilizational crusade.
- The defeat of fascism and the Cold War confrontation with communism cemented “democracy” as the opposite of totalitarianism, so that any criticism of democratic excesses risked being heard as sympathy for the enemy.
- Progressive and socialist historiography treated classical republicanism as an incomplete bourgeois stage whose true fulfillment was “fuller” democracy, or eventually social or people’s democracy.
By the mid-twentieth century the word had acquired quasi-religious status. To be against “democracy” was to be against freedom, progress, and the people themselves. Institutional limits, minority protections, federalism, or civic-virtue requirements could now be portrayed as residual elitism or anti-democratic obstacles.
The process of sacralization produced a profound impoverishment of political language. Once “democracy” became synonymous with political goodness itself, criticism of democratic excesses such as demagoguery, short-termism, the tyranny of the majority, and the corrosion of civic virtue became nearly unsayable without inviting the charge of anti-democratic heresy (Tocqueville 1835-40; Pettit 1997). Republican categories that had once allowed precise diagnosis of these dangers were either absorbed into a flattened democratic idiom or dismissed as aristocratic residue.
The result is a conceptual trap. Defenders of non-domination find themselves forced to argue on the terrain chosen by their opponents, as every appeal to institutional restraint must be framed as a higher or more authentic form of democracy rather than as a distinct republican good. This linguistic capture has been especially damaging in academic and journalistic discourse, where the republican tradition is routinely reduced to a historical curiosity or a partisan label, while “democratic” retains automatic moral capital (Skinner 1998; Pocock 1975). Mazzini’s own insistence that popular sovereignty must be disciplined by moral duty and national association became almost inaudible once the simpler cry of “democracy” dominated the field (Mazzini 1860).
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THE TROJAN-HORSE EFFECT
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Because pure democracy elevates will over formation, the sacralization of the term accelerated the neglect of the formative institutions that republicans considered indispensable: civic education, local self-government, independent associations, and the cultivation of public spirit. When legitimacy is reduced to the counting of heads or the mobilization of identity blocs, the slower work of making citizens capable of self-rule appears secondary or even suspect (Viroli 2002).
Once the term was sacred, almost every ideological family could enter the citadel by declaring itself the authentic voice of democracy:
- Socialists and communists created “people’s democracies” and “democratic republics” whose constitutions retained elections, assemblies, and rights language while real power lay with the party and the security apparatus. “Democratic socialism” continues the same maneuver: it claims the moral prestige of democracy while treating constitutional restraints and independent economic bases as temporary or secondary. The sacralized word disarms critics; opposition is framed as opposition to the people rather than to a particular program of state power.
- Authoritarians of various stripes learned the same lesson. Twentieth-century dictatorships routinely called themselves democratic or popular democracies. Contemporary authoritarian populists invoke “the will of the people” to justify the weakening of courts, independent media, or federal structures, all while waving the democratic flag.
- Far-right and ethno-nationalist movements discovered that majoritarian democracy can be turned against liberal or republican constraints. If democracy means the unfiltered will of the authentic nation, then constitutionalism, minority rights, or cosmopolitan institutions can be denounced as elite plots against the demos.
- Populism in general whether left, right, or neither thrives on the sacralized term. By defining politics as a struggle between a homogeneous “people” and a corrupt “elite,” populists treat intermediary institutions, mixed government, and civic education as filters that dilute the pure popular will. The sacredness of democracy makes it difficult to reply that the republican tradition always feared precisely this unmediated popular sovereignty.
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HISTORICAL CASE STUDIES OF DEVASTATION
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The twentieth-century supplies the most devastating empirical record. The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and the subsequent construction of “soviet democracy” demonstrated how the sacralized term could legitimize the most thoroughgoing form of party dictatorship while retaining the external trappings of popular rule. Similar linguistic maneuvers justified the one-party states of the postwar Eastern bloc, the “democratic centralism” of Marxist-Leninist parties, and the various Third-World socialist republics that combined electoral rituals with systematic repression (Kolakowski 1978).
On the right, interwar fascist and authoritarian movements frequently claimed to be purifying or completing democracy against liberal and parliamentary corruption; the word’s prestige made resistance more difficult until the regimes had already concentrated power. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the same Trojan-horse dynamic reappeared in milder but still corrosive forms under left-populist governments in Latin America using democratic majorities to dismantle horizontal accountability, while right-populist governments in Europe and elsewhere invoked the people against “unelected” courts and bureaucracies (Mény and Surel 2002). In each case the sacralization of democracy lowered the defensive threshold of republican institutions.
In each case the Trojan horse works the same way. The attackers do not storm the gates under their own name but arrive claiming to be the truest democrats. The defenders, having already conceded that democracy is the highest political good, find themselves arguing on the invaders’ chosen terrain.
The cultural consequence has been a progressive replacement of the republican citizen by the democratic consumer, client, or identity warrior. Both left-wing and right-wing populisms thrive on this substitution by promising empowerment through direct identification with a leader or a movement rather than through the demanding practices of self-restraint and mutual accountability. Over time the reservoir of civic capacity required to resist both oligarchic and demagogic domination is depleted (Rosanvallon 2008). The demonization of republican language compounds the damage; and anyone who insists on duties, virtue, or constitutional form risks being branded a defender of privilege or an enemy of the people.
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HOW “REPUBLICAN” BECAME DEMONIZED AND THE DECLINE OF CIVIC VIRTUE
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As democracy rose, republicanism was progressively stripped of independent prestige. In the United States the term became almost exclusively identified with one political party, so that the broader philosophical tradition could be tainted by partisan association. In progressive and socialist historiography, classical and nineteenth-century republicanism was recast as an incomplete, property-centered, or racially exclusionary stage whose unfinished work only fuller democracy or socialism could complete. Defending mixed government or non-domination therefore risked being heard as nostalgia for hierarchy rather than as a coherent theory of freedom (Pettit 1997).
The linguistic asymmetry is now nearly total. “Democratic” confers automatic legitimacy; “republican” (outside narrow party usage) sounds formal, conservative, or anti-popular. This asymmetry has practical effects: it becomes easier for populists and authoritarians of every orientation to claim the sacred mantle while those who insist on constitutional form are placed on the defensive. The long-term consequence is the progressive closure of the conceptual space in which a genuine republican alternative, neither pure majoritarianism nor administrative (or party) domination, could again become politically thinkable.
- In popular and academic usage the two terms were increasingly collapsed, so that “republic” lost its distinctive meaning as a mixed, non-dominating constitution.
- In the United States the word became tightly identified with one political party. Once that party was polarized or culturally marked, the broader tradition was easily tainted by association.
- Progressive and socialist narratives portrayed classical and nineteenth-century republicanism as elitist, property-centered, or racially exclusionary — an incomplete stage to be superseded by inclusive democracy or socialism. Defending republican institutional limits could therefore be smeared as nostalgia for hierarchy.
- In European contexts “republican” sometimes retained positive valence (French républicain), but even there it was often absorbed into left or center-left usage while its classical emphasis on virtue and non-domination was softened.
- The result is a linguistic asymmetry in which the term “democratic” carries almost automatic moral prestige; and “republican” (outside narrow party usage) “sounds” formal, old-fashioned, or partisan. Critics of pure majoritarianism or of socialist redefinitions of popular sovereignty can be accused of being anti-democratic far more easily than defenders of democracy can be accused of being anti-republican.
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CONSEQUENCES FOR THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION
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The sacralization of democracy and the demonization of republican language closed conceptual space. The cumulative damage is therefore not merely theoretical. It is measured in the repeated collapse or hollowing-out of constitutional orders, the rise of new forms of arbitrary power wearing democratic masks, the erosion of the civic capacities required for self-government, and the near-impossibility of articulating a principled alternative without being immediately recoded as anti-democratic.
Movements that concentrate power, whether in a party, a leader, an administrative class, or a mobilized majority can claim the sacred mantle while the older republican criteria are left without a living, prestigious vocabulary. That is why the recovery of the civic republican tradition must begin by desacralizing the term “democracy,” restoring the classical distinction, and refusing to let every claimant to popular power automatically inherit the moral capital once attached to free government. Only then can the Trojan horse be recognized for what it is. The Trojan horse succeeded because the defenders had already agreed that the most important word in the political lexicon belonged exclusively to the invaders.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951).
- Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
- Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000).
- James Madison, “Federalist No. 10,” in The Federalist Papers (1787).
- Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
- Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man (London: Chapman & Hall, 1860).
- Yves Mény and Yves Surel, eds., Democracies and the Populist Challenge (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
- Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
- Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
- J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
- Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
- Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835-1840).
- Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
- Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).
