Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

No Such Thing as 'Pure' Democracy

Don't make excuses for American government on the basis of semantics.

August 15, 2014 at 8:02 PM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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I'm a big fan of the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein, but he really slipped up here:

The important point to remember is that the United States was never intended to be a pure democracy, but a representative republic.