“These Trump supporters say America isn’t a democracy. And they’re okay with it.” So reads the breathless headline from a story last week by CNN.

Apparently, CNN thinks that this view is anathema to the American way of life. But a closer look reveals the truth about what America was founded to be. It also reveals that some on the Left deem the Constitution undemocratic, even anti-democratic, as evidenced by this piece that appeared in the New York Times a while back. It is titled, Think the Constitution Will Save Us? Think Again.

As evidence that the Constitution rejects democracy, the NYT piece points to Federalist #10, penned by James Madison, who wrote: “[D]emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property. . . .”

Unfortunately, the NYT misses entirely the true meaning of Madison’s critique of “democracy,” a mistake also made by CNN in its report.

Here is the type of democracy disparaged by Madison in Federalist #10, which he describes immediately before his observation that “democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention”: “From this view of the subject, it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction” (italics mine).

Therefore, Madison recommends for the new country the other type of popular government, a “republic,” in which the sovereign people rule through their elected representatives. A republic, for Madison, is a democracy—a representative democracy.

Stated differently, for Madison, “popular government” is the genus, of which both pure democracy and a republic are the species. America at its founding rejected the former species and established the latter.

And rightly so. As I have written elsewhere, I suspect that CNN and the NYT—after studying the injustices perpetrated under the pure democracies of antiquity (for example, Socrates’ execution by democratic Athens for the crime of being politically incorrect)—would be forced to concur with Madison’s assertion that these pure democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.”

To avoid the fatal defects of pure democracies, America instead chose representative democracy. The Constitution is decidedly pro-democracy, but just as decidedly anti-“pure democracy”—as history suggests all liberty-lovers should be.

So, when CNN’s interviewees responded that America is not a democracy, they were right in the sense in which Madison uses the term in The Federalist. The Founders knew well that pure majoritarianism does not equal justice or the common good. All legitimate governments place limits on the ruling authority. In America, the people are the ultimate ruling authority; thus, the Founders had to find some means of preventing American democracy from recreating Athens’s debacle. This was the aim Thomas Jefferson articulated in his First Inaugural Address (1801): “All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.”

In sum, if we understand American democracy falsely—as a “pure” democracy—we have no means of protecting the rights of the minority. Only representation, anchored in a written Constitution, has a chance of accomplishing not only the goal of restraining unjust majorities but, also, of doing so in a wholly democratic manner. And only through what Lincoln called “reverence for the Constitution” can we hope to avoid what he called “mobocratic” rule—the form of rule that follows under life in a pure democracy.

This is why the answer to the question—“Is America a democracy or a republic?”—is, “Yes.”