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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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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?