democratic republic

You'll often hear right-wingers say that our founding fathers designed our government as a Republic, not a democracy, but those are not mutually exclusive terms.

And if you think about it for 0.5 seconds or so, you'll realize that a democratic republic is a possibility.

A correspondent recently wrote that "the F&F quite despised democracy, which is why we were given a Constitutional REPUBLIC..."

If that's the case, then why does the Constitution begin with the words "We the people..."?