THE COMPLAINING about the possible appointment of Caroline Kennedy’s to fill New York’s vacant senate seat reached almost Sarah Palin levels of meanness last week, as many insisted the former president’s daughter is following precisely in Caribou Barbie’s footsteps—going too hard after an office for which she is manifestly unqualified. Transcripts and montages of Kennedy saying “you know” 30 times in a 2-and-a-half-minute interview blew about the internet and cable news. Among the analysts, the word on the wind was “undemocratic.” An MSNBC.com writer asked, “Is America’s political nobility undemocratic?” Gawker editor Alex Pareene waved the democracy flags even harder, calling the Senate “already un-American and anti-democratic enough.” 

Sure, the Senate is full of men and women from political dynasties—rich, well-connected elitists. Sure, Caroline Kennedy’s “campaign” for Hillary Clinton’s seat absolutely smacks of entitlement—it’s a job she might never be willing or able to win the way Hillary won it. But when it comes to calling her appointment “undemocratic,” we’re making the wrong complaint. The Senate has always been undemocratic. On purpose. In fact, it’s way more democratic than it was ever supposed to be.

With the way the term “democracy” is batted around these days, it’s sometimes important to restate a basic fact out loud: the United States is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. Our founders endlessly documented their contempt for the mob-rule aesthetic and political dangers of too much democracy in essays, debates, and letters. They envisioned the Senate as a body to represent the state legislatures, while the House of Representatives would more directly represent the people. (Hence, every state gets two senators no matter its size, while more populous states get more representatives.) In Federalist No. 62, James Madison considered the idea of state governments appointing senators a matter on which it was “unnecessary to dilate.” The final draft of the Constitution read: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, chosen by the legislature thereof.”

The original system worked well for its first century, until stirrings of more direct democracy awakened after the Civil War. Legislative gridlock in the 19th century left a number of Senate seats vacant, and backroom deals like Blagola were common practice. Frustration with those unfortunate situations made progressive reforms trendy—sweeping overhauls instead of patient adjustments to the system. “Over time, the public came to have less respect for constitutional forms,” Ralph Rossom writes in Federalism, the Supreme Court, and the Seventeenth Amendment. Progressives labeled federalism “mechanistic,” and insisted a new, Darwinian era of “living government” had arrived. After lengthy, heated debate in Congress, the Seventeenth Amendment rewrote the constitution and instated the direct election of senators.

Like other progressive reforms, the movement for direct election proposed giving people more freedom by dismantling the very systems designed to protect their freedoms. The legislative branch was clumsy and slow-moving by design, constructed to slow the actions of a future, more powerful federal government. (The founders thought, somewhat amusingly, that the legislative branch would be the most prone to tyranny). Of course, few things are more annoying to utilitarian, visionary Americans than government forms designed to slow them down—a tendency democracy-loving progressives have routinely preyed upon. In the second volume of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville comments on this democratic haste, detectable as far back as the mid-1800s:

Forms excite [Americans’] contempt and often their hatred; as they commonly aspire to none but easy and present gratifications, they rush onwards to the object of their desires, and the slightest delay exasperates them. … Yet this objection which the men of democracies make to forms is the very thing which renders forms so useful to freedom; for their chief merit is to serve as a barrier between the strong and the weak, the ruler and the people, to retard the one, and give the other time to look about him. Forms become more necessary in proportion as the government becomes more active and more powerful.”

Forms like state appointment of senators slow down the process and prevent both government excess and the rash, impulsive popular movements that direct-democracy ideas like popular recalls, ballot initiatives, and elected judges often enable. Interactions between individual citizens and the federal government should be relatively few; otherwise a kind of tyranny develops where the people are allowed to go over the heads of the state government they elected, prematurely remove someone from office that they voted in fair and square (see California’s recall of Governor Gray Davis), or write things into law with their own pencils (see Proposition 8). All of these ideas purport to correct real abuses or excesses in the system, but what if they also end up destroying the whole thing?

As Tocqueville deeply understood, Americans’ distaste for formality, procedure and anything that “gets in the way” often leads to popular notions that any sort of government procedure that doesn’t involve the people's direct vote is “un-American.” That’s childish, of course, since we’ve already had plenty of votes by the time the state government makes something like a Senate appointment. Who chose the governor? The state representatives? In a federal system, the individual’s vote takes place at the ground level—arguably the most crucial, if you understand the system. If you want a say, take your local elections as seriously as they’re supposed to be taken. American citizens already have extraordinary power through their state and local governments, but are often too cynical and impatient to use it.

So since most of the time we do get to elect our senators directly, it’s asinine to refer to the Senate—or the occasional state appointment—as “anti-democratic,” or, even more ridiculous, “un-American.” It’s supposed to be undemocratic. We’re citizens of a republic, and it's our body of elite advisors.

By those standards, Caroline Kennedy’s appointment isn’t undemocratic, but it might be safely called “un-American” if you look at this way: the Senate’s elitism is supposed to be about character, experience, and statesmanship, not family dynasty or (exclusively) money. “They are eloquent attorneys, distinguished generals, skillful magistrates, or well-known statesmen,” Tocqueville described. “All the words that issue from this assembly would do honor to the greatest parliamentary debates of Europe.” Ms. Kennedy is, um, you know, none of the above.