Imagine you are my house guest and I say to you, “I am heading to the grocery store. Is there anything special I can get you?” You reply, “Could you bring me a bag of apples?”
Later I return from the store handing you a bag of oranges. With a confused look on your face, you ask, “Were they out of apples?”
I reply, “Oh, no, they had plenty of apples, but the oranges were closer so I grabbed them. After all, they are the same thing.”
Now, you have to admit there are many similarities between apples and oranges. Both are round, grow on trees, are high in vitamin C, have sugar, are colorful, have stems, peels, can be made into juices, can be cut into slices, have seeds, come in many different varieties (Washington, red delicious, Navel, Valencia, etcetera). But there’s one difference between which cancels out all those similarities….
They don’t taste the same.
That one difference is all that matters.
Republics and democracies also have similarities. Both involve using majorities to decide things (elections, referendums, votes in legislatures and Congress, who controls government committees based on which party holds the majority), both are forms of government, both allow for people to become ...
