Republic is orthogonal to Democracy.
How so?? I agree they are orthogonal in the sense that they can't even be compared since they aren't adjectives of the same stuff. Democracy is a regime, republic is a way of government, a country can be both or none. USA is a democratic republic, it's under democratic regime and republican government. It's easy to say if a country is a republic because you just have to examine it's government, but democracy is a very subjective issue, you have to observe not only the existence of direct elections, but also press liberty, education and information access, liberty of ideas, freedom plurality in political parties and etc. Maybe americans get messed up about this because of the political parties name, it puts these 2 different stuff in the same plane: political ideas when actually these names are only a matter of "marketing" (Republican party is democratic as well since it tries to govern through democracy and direct elections). If you take a look at ancient greek cities such as Sparta and Athens and also Rome during the republic, you'll see they were clearly republics, and also due to it's republican govern democracy existed in a very limited way even if democracy concept wasn't clear at that time. So you can say that these 2 stuff are complementary, they may even be implemented separated, but when they are used together (+ capitalism and freedom) you have a very solid basis for a democratic and free society.
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