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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?
So you only discuss with yourself?
There is some truth in that, I only pay attention to people who have a valid point.
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.
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.
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.
In practice, however, it is a two-party system.