James Hankins is a professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. His most recent books are Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy. In this readily readable essay Professor Hankins discusses misunderstandings of the United States’ Founders opinions about the best governance for the new nation: we were to be a ‘republic’ not a ‘democracy’. For example: John Adams wrote ““Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide”. And James Madison’s impressive contributions to the new US Constitution included structural means to avoid risks of power-wielding popular factions. Professor Hankins briefly identifies and discusses sources for the Founders’ understanding of ‘republics’ and ‘democracies’ and how they reasoned through the failures in other times and places – ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, etc, to establish our republic. Hankins concludes that “If modern advocates for “our democracy” fancy themselves lovers of the people, they might appreciate the fact that our republic at its founding was already weighted towards the popular more than previous early modern republics had been. The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution made it still more so.” Since our two major political parties name themselves amidst the tension between ‘democracies’ and ‘republics’ this essay and other work by Hankins may be instructive of finding better ways to understand one another. Immensely learned Professor Hankins has published a bounty of brief, readable esssays with the Law & Liberty forum including on such various public topics as reparations, meritocracy, and the crisis in higher education; as well discussions, with moral insights and tools, in such essential human matters as civics learning and finding happiness.