this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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I think there is more nuance to that. The US is a representative democracy with first past the post voting, which was never about the popular vote. It was adopted to deal with issues from a few centuries ago including technological limitations of voting and widespread illiteracy. It was also adopted to deliberately disenfranchise non-white male voters.
Nowadays there is no reason to keep voting this way other than to keep the unpopular party and unpopular politicians in power through gerrymandering.
I mean, if you look at the Merriam Webster definition of democracy it specifically includes direct and indirect democracies.
Is the voting situation in the US fucked? Absolutely. But it's still a representative democracy regardless. Having equal representation and voting rights is not a prerequisite for this system of government. What you see right now is representative democracy working as intended by this country's founders. Voter disenfranchisement is rooted in the electoral foundations of this country.
We shouldn't be putting democracy on a pedestal because this is a democracy and it's working as intended by people in power. Being a democracy alone doesn't automatically make a country great. We need much more than that. What we need to push for is voting access, literacy, and tear down lobbying and media conglomerates.
I feel like that's a no true Scotsman fallacy. We look at the word democracy and idealize it as a perfect system of government regardless of how it's implemented. Democracy alone isn't enough. It's one facet in a complicated political machinery. For a democracy to be effective, you have to assume that people are capable of voting in their own interests, people have sufficient media literacy, people aren't forced into voting for the lesser of two evils, and that people have equal access to voting polls. Right now, the US has none of these things done right. It's an ineffective democracy, but a democracy nonetheless.
The thing that we need to recognize is that it is possible for a democracy to be bad. Now, please don't take this as support for a non-democratic government, because that's the last thing on my mind. I'm simply saying that it is possible for democracy to be poorly implemented and still fall within the definition of democracy.
As a reminder, Athenian democracy only allowed 1 in 4 people, who were free male citizens, to vote. That is one of the origins of democracy, and by definition, a type of democracy. People today would be appalled if we applied the same standards, but that doesn't make it any less of a democracy.