What “We’re a republic, not a democracy” means
By 
Lot of people pretending Lee was taking some sort of philosophical Millian/Madisonian position about the tyranny of the majority when what he really means is “Republicans should get to rule even if voters prefer Democrats”— David Watkins (@djw172) October 8, 2020
That’s it.
Meanwhile, Vox has a good piece on the origins of the stupid catchprhase in Bircher opposition to desegregation:
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.
“It goes back to the ‘republic, not a democracy’ chants from the 1964 [Republican] convention,” she tells me. “Conservatives rejected the one-person-one-vote standard of the Warren Court, a set of arguments deeply entangled with their opposition to the Black civil rights movement.”
The past isn’t even past.