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Absolutely not. A two party system was barely nominally a form of democracy. Current one quacks like a dictatorship and walks like a dictatorship. They might hold a fake election one day like many of those do, but still no.
Firstly, the USA is obviously not a "dictatorship". Come on, be serious. Words mean things.
Second, America's two-party system also has internal factions and primaries, many of them completely open (you don't even need to declare allegiance to the party). The primaries are effectively the first round in a two-round electoral system (of which there are plenty in the world). The whole point is to create a binary choice in the final round. For some reason this always gets missed by otherwise informed observers. "There are only two parties" is just not a valid argument in this debate.
Of course, none of these facts will be popular here, since the real point of this thread is to allow participants to performatively dump on the shared hate-object. Classic social media, I get it.
They do. Have you ever heard about elective dictatorship?
Mere presence of elections, especially gerrymandered to hell and especially where minority can easily win, does not make a democracy.
The USA is categorized by people who have studied this subject more closely than you (or me) as a flawed democracy. This is a dumb discussion. That's all I have to say here.
And you know it is how, exactly?
I don't discuss with people who downvote my comments. You clearly don't care what I have to say. Good night.
How do we see who downvotes?
I know they had that on kbin but not Lemmy. I want to see it too. Which client or frontend are you using?
I just extrapolated. Their comment was posted at the same time as a downvote.
If they denied it I would apologize.
That's disappointing. It would be a useful tool to have. Apparently the info is available in ActivityPub, we just need a client that sees it.
You think? I don't much care about downvotes. But I do end conversations if I suspect that that other party is doing it.
I'd rather simply know if someone is downvoting my conversation with them. There's no point playing guessing games in an active thread.
The other application for it is seeing if someone is constantly upvoting themself with multiple accounts, and seeing who is upvoting trolls and nazis.
So you only discuss with yourself?
There is some truth in that, I only pay attention to people who have a valid point.
You sure about that? Have you read the news lately?
Yeah I have and saying that kinda just makes you seem uninformed.
Like the people who call the US "a 3rd world country in a Gucci belt". It just makes it super obvious that you don't understand how high quality of a life the average person has in the US. Especially globally.
Well think about a lot of the characteristics of the US and maybe you'll at least see where they're coming from. It's not about 100% accuracy as much as perspective. And it seems like it'd hard to shatter illusions some people there have.
High poverty rate compared to developed countries, low literacy rates compared to developed countries, Highly authoritarian, highly propagandised, militia compounds spread throughout.
You you can be taken and imprisoned in a desert camp, fed expired food, put in a chain gang and not that it would be OK otherwise, but you haven't been convicted of a crime.
Constant terrorist attacks.
You can be put in solitary until you have psychosis and youre smearing feces on the walls, and then the confessions you give after that can be used in court.
There was a mass protest of slave Labour and the slaves were starved until they went back to work.
You can be disappeared and have your residency revoked for protesting war crimes. You had someone who worked in your torture camps run to be a candidate for president and they got far.
Child marriage is legal.
People are sent back to a polluted industrial hazard town after train derailment and all the animals are dead and they're complaining of chemical burns. If they complain the get dragged out by cops.
Food standards not accepted elsewhere. Companies can poison large parts of the population and even if they're punished its an amount that still means the profited from it
They took a guy who promoted health misinformation that led to dead kids and they put him in charge of health, even though a worm ate his brain.
Expansionist, aggressive, worships the military but fucks over veterans, complains about first responders injured on the job getting health care, so they scrapped it. Constantly chasing culture was BS, never quite left the satanic panic.
I'm not going to list all the red flags, but there is a reason people feel like this. A few major ones, president talking about taking over other countries out of the blue, attacking our allies to the point where Americans are suffering much more than necessary, his sidekick doing Nazi salutes on stage, literal commercials for his $idekick on the white house lawn.
It's pretty clear there is no rule of law for blatant corruption and no accountability. Replace USA/Trump with Russia/Putin or NK/Un, guess what, same shit, different smell. Either follow orders or get shipped out is the example they're trying to set, as well as making free speech illegal.
We're FAR from a functioning democracy.
While I don't consider the system of governance there very good, I'll have to agree. While I do absolutely worry for the American democracy, it isn't a dictatorship in its current form. I also agree that the primaries do make the system better and more democratic. I still think that the two part system is abysmal, but the primaries do make the claim to democracy stronger.
That's a balanced and fair-minded take. Unfortunately it won't be appreciated here, because what people are looking for in this thread is catharsis and confirmation of their biases.
In practice, however, it is a two-party system.