Please not this misguided pedantry. A country can be a republic and a democracy. Those terms are not mutually exclusive.

I didn't write this frivolously.

There are people marching through the streets chanting, "this is what democracy looks like." They don rose-tinted glasses - projecting their mob rule fantasy of popular vote and pure democracy on our explicitly democratic republic.

Words have meaning. It's not misguided pedantry.

Moreover, by the conventional definition of democracy (government legitimacy derives from the votes of some subset of the population) all republics are necessarily democracies.

As I understand it, "democracy" can be used narrowly to mean a direct democracy, more broadly to mean a range of democratic political systems (e.g. constitutional republics, constitutional monarchies, etc.), or even more broadly to mean the overall philosophy and approach to government associated with liberal democracy.

It's sort of like how functional programming can just mean "programming with pure, mathematical style functions" or more broadly it can mean the techniques associated with functional programming like pattern matching, currying, etc.

In this case, it seems to me that the intention was to use the most broad sense of democracy.

A republic is a way to organise a state and its government (with elected head of state and a kind of legislative or governing assembly). In a representative democracy, the people doing the governing and the legislating are elected by the citizens who grant them legitimacy.

You can have democratic (e.g. Iceland) or oligarchic republics (e.g. Ukraine), all the way to dictatorships (e.g. Russia).

Being a democracy and being a republic are completely orthogonal.

Besides this being unhelpful "misguided pedantry", there's also the issue that what the founders wanted to create and what exists today are not necessarily the same.

Wasn't there a paper a while back that showed how the US is more than likely a plutocracy.

You might be thinking of the Princeton study which determined that policy is mainly influenced by wealthy interest groups[1]. The conclusions rang true with how a lot of people see the system operate in the past century. Interestingly enough, this was ranking higher in search results, when I was looking for a link to the study itself[2]: "Remember that study saying America is an oligarchy? 3 rebuttals say it's wrong." Worth noting that the VOX article finds high agreement between the rich and middle class, while the lower class appears to get their policies enacted in less than one fifth of the cases.

[1]: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

[2]: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-...

These days it's closer to a pathocracy: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201...