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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Uhhh yeah. The Constitution establishes a federal democratic republic form of government. That is, we have an indivisible union of 50 sovereign States. It is a democracy because people govern themselves. It is representative because people choose elected officials by free and secret ballot.
It's democracy when only white men are allowed to choose representatives? What?
It's settler-colonialism. Fascism. Where was the democracy for the Natives? Or the slaves? The original system has had many democratic reforms, but denying its roots as fundamentally undemocratic is historical revisionism and blinds you to the US's flaws. You'll never fix this country's problems if you can't even recognize this.
Bro I'm native, I know! I think it's a piece of shit also but it could be worse. I'm also trying to rage against the machine.
It can always be worse! How come you can acknowledge that it's shit, but you can't acknowledge that it's fundamentally undemocratic? Where's the disconnect here? The US was not founded as a democracy, it was founded as a white supremacist settler-colony. Today it's had many democratic reforms, and that's good! But we have to acknowledge these root problems.
Has it had enough reforms to be called a democracy? Trump got less than 50% of the vote and he's been elected twice!
As a Brit, this all seems unhelpful. The only reason anyone cares how the US was “founded” hundreds of years ago is that they were a bit closer to having the right idea at the start than most countries. Doesn’t mean they did of course, but compare to how the UK was “founded”, or Greece, “the birthplace of democracy”, and suddenly it really doesn’t matter.
As for whether it is currently a democracy, a flawed democracy is still a democracy. Trumps a terrible choice but he did get a lot of votes by ordinary people, and whilst their system is skewed by being a shitty fptp setup (just like the UK sadly) and their crazy elector system, it is nonetheless fairly democratic, in the sense that most people can vote, they didn’t pressure or threaten voters much, they didn’t fake lots of votes, and the flaws can only influence and skew the result to some extent, rather than being the deciding factor. But it isn’t the best democracy in the world, we can all agree on that. I hope they manage to replace it in our lifetimes with something that would allow for more than 2 parties (UK too).
He got a lot of votes, but he didn't actually get the majority. He got a plurality.
Unless all people can vote it isn't a democracy. It totally reverses the power dynamic of democracy - rather than the People choosing their leaders, the leaders choose who gets to be of the People. It's completely backwards! As long as the enduring legacy of settler-colonialism can choose who is allowed to vote there will be no democracy.
The way electoral districts are drawn, the way voters get purged or have to go through hoops to get registered, the way people can have their right to vote taken away, the way noncitizens and disenfranchised citizens in federal prisons are counted by the census for the purpose of allotting representatives, the efforts to keep voter participation as low as possible, it's all rigged to produce undemocratic results.
It's useful for us to recognize that this isn't democracy. Not yet.
Strongly disagree. Yes, all the problems you listed weaken a democracy. Some by a lot. But that’s “no true Scotsman” logic, and dangerous. Better to apply fuzzy logic than Boolean logic, countries are not perfect democracies or non democracies. They are on a sliding scale, and there’s not much point making a scale that is so idealistic that no existing country can get on the scale (or where only the best few can).
You can claim the US and UK are weak democracies, that’s justifiable if you define why (and you have, I see your point there). But calling them non democracies is just willfully twisting the meaning of words, in fact they’re unusually good democracies by some measures (both have unusually free and trustworthy elections compared to most in the world, and that has to be taken into account).
Or to put it another way, any scale needs space at the bottom.
Imagine an alternative USA where every single state was gerrymandered to hell by whoever won, where electors were routinely bribed by opposition parties to vote against their states results, where people were bullied at the polls or where minorities were entirely disenfranchised. That would be a worse place than our USA, but by your definition both would be the same. Clearly they are not the same, that one is a worse democracy. By my definition that hypothetical and awful democracy is still a democracy, just a very very bad one.
Okay. Now imagine an alternative USA where only a small selection of royal families are allowed to vote and electors are aristocrats chosen by birth and court intrigue. By your definition this hypothetical is also a democracy, even if it's an awful very very bad one. You have nuanced away the meaning of the word entirely.
Yes, great example. That would indeed be stretching the definition to breaking point. The fuzzy logic approach would be that you’ve described a 99% monarchy with 1% democracy.
Personally I’d put the US as a 60% democracy with a 40% oligopoly. The UK is similar since on the one hand we have more than 2 parties and are slightly better at avoiding gerrymandering and voter suppression, but on the other hand we have the silly rules for the House of Lords, and weaker freedom of speech (I don’t mind the theory of banning violent extremist speech, but I don’t like the application we’ve got at the moment, it prevents too much speech that isn’t unreasonable, free speech would be better).
Based on what you’ve said, I’m Sure you’d put it lower, but I don’t think you can justify putting 1% when it’s so easy to find worse countries even in the real world, that are still on the democracy spectrum.
Why are you applying this fuzzy logic to democracy when democracy, itself, does not? If one candidate gets 49% of the vote and the other gets 51% of the vote then the candidate with the most votes wins. Nothing fuzzy about it. If we apply liberal democracy's logic to itself then a country that isn't at least 50% democratic can not be called a democracy.
Because democracy is not the best way to solve every problem.
The messy job of squeezing entire countries into a handful of words is fraught enough without throwing away up to half of the information.
As a more amusing answer: Dictatorships throw away 99.9% of the opinions, so should we let one arsehole decide which countries are called a dictatorship?
I only said to apply the logic of liberal democracy to itself, not to apply it to all countries.
I think your insistence on using a fuzzy spectrum to define concrete terms results in words not meaning anything at all. The "99% monarchy 1% democracy" gets to call itself a democracy by your fuzzy logic because it has democratic elements. That's clearly not a good heuristic. There must be a point where the antidemocratic elements in a society disqualify it from being a democracy.
Everyone can always call themselves whatever they want. But fear that people might use a kernel of truth to sell a lie isn’t a good reason to throw away even a tiny part of the truth.
Okay, so you'll admit that the DPRK is a democracy since it has democratic elements.
No, but I will acknowledge where some democratic elements exist within even the DPRK, though they’re very thin and weak.
There are other forms of government that are a better match for describing the DPRK. One party dictatorship, for example.
If you want to apply the same logic to the US, calling it simply an oligarchy rings hollow, though there’s a stronger argument than DPRK+democracy I’ll admit. It’s a democracy with flaws, but those flaws are smaller than the democratic elements they weaken, so it still gets to be called a democracy.
I'll continue to call the US a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It's not like anyone else is allowed to run the country.
If you want to be technical a true democracy is mathematically impossible. Also Donald won the popular vote this time. Don't waste 4 years of your life chasing conspiracy theories like the right has and clinging to a fantasy that the loser actually won. I wish things were different but that's how it went.
He didn't get a majority of the votes. Less than 50%. That should mean something.
In a race with more than 2 people it shouldn't be uncommon to have less than 50% of the overall vote and still win. I don't understand the point you're trying to make. In this race he got the most votes compared to the other candidates.
Many countries use variations of runoff voting, where if no candidate gets a majority then the top two candidates move on to a second round and the other candidates are eliminated. This is actually the most popular way to run elections worldwide.
I'm aware but even assuming all of the non trump votes would go to Kamala, she still wouldn't have won in this case.
He got less than 50% of the vote. If you add all the non Trump votes together you get more than 50% of the vote.
Roughly 50.1% but that's still assuming none of these people would've switched to trump and this is how US elections work. Based on how things work Donald won the popular vote with less than 50%. I'm not saying it's the best way but it's also not like we suddenly switched up the rules. I assure you that I'm just as mad as you are about the system we have but when I look around no one honestly wants to do anything but complain about the way things are instead of being the change they expect to see. A president isn't going to fix our problems. If people cared more about taking back the power and less about consuming we might see some real change. The only thing that matters in this country is money and despite all the complaints we just can't seem to stop giving the ass holes running the show more of our money in one form or another.
That's not assuming none switched to Trump, merely that most switched to Harris. I think having such a close runoff race would also be likely to change how people voted more broadly. Turnout would be through the roof if everyone felt like their one vote would be the one that swung the election. It's really hard to say what the results would have been.
And we'll never know because this shithole country doesn't do runoff elections.
Yes, and it's bad. I'm saying the way US elections work is undemocratic. They are designed from the ground-up to favor the ruling class and suppress the will of the People. They are meant to be undemocratic. This was all intentional.
I get all of that. I'm saying a president (in this case Kamala) isn't going to fix this. No flavor of voting will fix our problems imo.
And I'm saying that, because voting in the US doesn't actually determine policy, we shouldn't call it democracy.
Then I think we agree for the most part.