Some of the earliest contrasts between “democracy” and “republic” in Lee’s sense, according to Cornell historian Lawrence Glickman, came from conservative opponents of the New Deal. At the time, President Roosevelt sold his policies — both domestic and foreign — as a means of defending and enhancing American democracy. Some of his opponents, who saw the president’s redistributive agenda as a kind of incipient authoritarianism, used the “republic versus democracy” distinction as a counter.
“There is no surer way to destroy our government than to champion legislation under the guise of democracy, which piece by piece undermines the checks and balances of our republic,” anti-New Dealer H.W. Prentis Jr. wrote in 1939.The John Birch Society, a radical faction in the postwar conservative movement, helped popularize the “republic versus democracy” distinction in the 1950s and ’60s. According to Nicole Hemmer, a historian of the conservative movement at Columbia University, the idea really took off on the right during the conservative fight against civil rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings expanding the franchise.
If you need a little poly sci brushing up of the distinction between democracy and republics, read the entire Vox explainer by . It puts these civics-book abstractions into much important historical context. The explainer is written to explain Senator Mike Lee's tweet last week that “democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are.” He, as someone in the minority, fears democracy as a threat to his liberty, peace, and prosperity, and so this apparently justifies in his mind minority rule to insure that people like him remain free, peaceful, and prosperous.
That this might impinge on the liberty and prosperity of others isn't apparently a concern. That this is an ideology to legitimate oligarchy is either something at best he is unaware of or doesn't care about, or at worst is something that he actually desires, so long as he's one of the oligarchs.
Oligarchs are terrified of the power of majorities, because they assume, whether consciously or unconsciously, that those majorities envy and resent them for what they have "achieved", and would deal as cruelly with them as they have dealt with their adversaries in their climb to the top. You don't have to be much of a psychologist to appreciate how so much of what conservatives say about Liberals is flagrant projection of their own repressed fears and desires.
White supremacy is nothing more than the fear among many Whites that the way Whites have treated Blacks is exactly how Blacks would treat Whites if they lose supreme power. Black Lives Matter triggers dark memories of Nat Turner's Rebellion. This makes no rational sense, but that's the way fear works in the souls of those who haven't much self-knowledge. And from what I've seen of Mike Lee, Devin Nunes, Lindsey Graham, et al., self-knowledge is something that they have no interest in at all.
There is a kind of Social Darwinist logic that undergirds the mindset of oligarchs and wannabe oligarchs. It's as primitive as the bull moose who wins by brute force exclusive access to the cows by beating off all competitors. It's a game king of the hill where the stakes are higher than bragging rights as a kid but control of the whole system and everybody in it. Putin is exemplary here, but it's a mentality that flourishes wherever brute force is the basic measure of prestige and authority.
Donald Trump is a wannabe authoritarian, but he's hasn't the competency or attention span to pull it off except in the abusive way he treats the sycophants in his immediate vicinity. He's also too lazy to do the actual work that's involved. It's much more fun to play at it, which is essentially all he has ever done and is doing now.
Americans who see brute force as the basic measure of prestige and authority are Trump's greatest admirers. And Trump, though buffoonish in the exercise of his brutishness, has normalized behaviors that have had a profoundly fragilizing effect on our democratic republic. Mike Lee seems oblivious of that. He would appear not to have the bandwidth to understand that the difference between the republican form of government that preserves liberties by everyone's consenting to the rule of law is not the same thing as minorities protecting their liberties by use of force, blatant lying, and rigging the system in their favor. The Vox explainer goes on--
One of the most difficult questions in political philosophy, endlessly debated in academic journals, is how societies should navigate between the democratic principle that majorities rule and the liberal principle that certain rights may never be permissibly violated.
But the tradition Lee is operating out of goes further than that. It casts doubt on the most basic democratic principle: that the people who win the public’s support should rightly govern. It takes such an extreme position on what should be out of bounds that it can be used to argue that Democrats being able to implement their policy agenda is itself a form of tyranny.
In other words, if wannabe tyrants don't like it, it's tyranny.