Lauren Boebert ‘We Are Not A Democracy’ Quote

On March 30 2023, a screenshot shared to Reddit suggested Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) said of the United States that “we are not a democracy”:

No date was visible in the screenshot, but the tweet was also published on March 30 2023. It linked to an article published by LGBTQNation.com on March 30 2023:

Lauren Boebert snarls “we’re not a democracy so quit with that!” in response to calls for gun laws

A separate post to Reddit’s r/facepalm also attributed that statement to Boebert, but it didn’t include any links:

LGBTQNation provided more context about Boebert’s purported statement:

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) lashed out at a gay leader of a teachers union for saying that the U.S. is a democracy.

“And, you know, maybe one of the things that we need to address with the Democrat party is, you played a clip from the teachers union with Randi there talking,” Boebert said, referring to out American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. “Maybe one thing we need to address is we’re not a democracy! So quit with that! … Maybe that’s where you’re getting it wrong,” Boebert ranted. “It’s saying that we are a democracy. We are a constitutional republic.”

She then said that schools should teach kids that the U.S. isn’t a democracy and that this would somehow end “all this woke nonsense.”

In that additional context, a broader statement was attributed to Boebert. Directly after “we are not a democracy,” Boebert was quoted as saying the United States is “a constitutional republic,” a statement that was in no way unique to her.

The claim has roots that go back decades and deep into the bowels of American conspiracy theories. In fact, it was popularized by none other than the John Birch Society:

The Birchers had a slogan that said, “We’re a republic, not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way.” That meant different things to different people, but they were quite opposed to the idea of multiracial democracy. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent comments and tweets about getting a “national divorce” and eviscerating the federal government — that does hark back to this Bircher idea that, “Hey, we’re a republic.”

I think that what Gordon Hall and a lot of liberal observers got wrong, especially over time, are the ways in which the Birch ideas were still very much alive in the country. They were not really ripe in 1970 or [the] ’80s or ’90s, but they became ripe in the past 15 years. They were there for the taking, and as we know, people took them up and ran with them in very powerful ways.

So I think that liberals forgot about the far-right opponents of democracy and of civil rights and voting rights. They were a more powerful presence than a lot of people acknowledged for many, many years — but now they’re easier to see.

In August 2022, the New York Times published “The Arizona Republican Party’s Anti-Democracy Experiment,” and examined a growing hostility on the right toward the concept of democracy:

… there is more at stake than the health of the Republican Party when its core activists, as well as a growing number of officials and those campaigning for governmental positions, openly espouse hostility not just to democratic principles but, increasingly, to the word “democracy” itself. It has long been a talking point on the right — from a chant at the 1964 Republican convention where Goldwater became the G.O.P. nominee to a set of tweets in 2020 by Senator Mike Lee of Utah — that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. The idea, embodied by the Electoral College’s primacy over the popular vote in presidential elections, is that the founders specifically rejected direct popular sovereignty in favor of a representative system in which the governing authorities are states and districts, not individual voters. But until very recently, democracy has been championed on the right: President George W. Bush, a subject of two books I’ve written, famously promoted democracy worldwide (albeit through military aggression that arguably undermined his cause). For that matter, in Trump’s speech at the rally on Jan. 6, he invoked the word “democracy” no fewer than four times, framing the attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a last-ditch effort to “save our democracy.”

What is different now is the use of “democracy” as a kind of shorthand and even a slur for Democrats themselves, for the left and all the positions espoused by the left, for hordes of would-be but surely unqualified or even illegal voters who are fundamentally anti-American and must be opposed and stopped at all costs. That anti-democracy and anti-“democracy” sentiment, repeatedly voiced over the course of my travels through Arizona, is distinct from anything I have encountered in over two decades of covering conservative politics.

A month later, NPR‘s “Is America a democracy or a republic? Yes, it is” alluded to a gray area in the headline, and later observed that “when critics call [election denialism] an attack on democracy, some election deniers respond by saying the U.S. is not a democracy, it is a republic.” An undated page on the non-partisan political action site Represent.us (“Is The United States A Democracy Or A Republic?”) addressed the debate in plain terms here.

As for whether Boebert said “we are not a democracy,” video of her statement was published to YouTube on March 30 2023. During an appearance on Charlie Kirk’s show, Boebert said:

And, uh, you know, maybe one of the things that we need to address with the Democrat party is you played a clip from the teachers’ union, uh, with [president] Randi [Weingarten] there talking … uh, uh, maybe one thing we need to address is we’re not a democracy, so quit with that!

Maybe — maybe that’s where you’re getting it wrong … is it’s saying that we are democracy — we are a democracy — we are a constitutional republic, and, and that is something that needs to be taught in our schools, not this woke critical race theory, on how to hate our country, and hate your fellow classmates and, uh, community members because of the color of their skin?

Maybe teach a little honor and respect for our history, and the correct history rather than all this woke nonsense that produces the Ilhan Omars of the world.

A viral March 30 2023 tweet asserted Rep. Lauren Boebert said “we are not a democracy,” with respect to the United States. Video of Boebert’s statement appeared on YouTube. Boebert’s assertion was part of an increased effort to undermine elections by undermining democracy itself, and the topic of whether the United States was, as NPR noted, “as old as the republic itself.” Represent.us noted that while “democracy” wasn’t mentioned in the Constitution, “John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Noah Webster, Justice James Wilson and Chief Justice John Marshall all used the word” democracy with respect to the governance of the United States.