this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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You can still have meaningful elections when there's only one party, people of the same party can run for the same position against each other, so there is still a choice between candidates. In fact, that's how many places work in the US, in solidly red or solidly blue districts, generally all the serious candidates run in whichever party is essentially guaranteed to win in the general.
It's true that in those situations the governing party can exercise control over who is allowed to run. But I don't really see how that's worse than the US system, where each party has complete control over the primary process and doesn't even have to hold primaries at all if they don't want to. Ultimately, I don't see either system as particularly more democratic than the other.
If some entity can control who can and cannot be a politician, then the power is on the entity that control the politicians, not on the people.
For the people to have the power, they must be able to elect the leaders they want. If that leader has to be approved by an entity, the power is on that entity. That's not a democracy, that's a monarchy where the monarch makes opinion polls.
Then the US is a diarchy. The two parties have control of who can and cannot be in their party, and as you said yourself, the way the system is set up makes it virtually impossible to have more or fewer than two parties. The US is not a democracy because the people don't get to choose their leaders, the leaders have to go through one of two entities and get approval there in order to have a chance to win.
As I said, the US is a flawed democracy (it's not only my opinion, it's ranked that why by global institutions). I'm not a US citizen btw. I'm a Spanish citizen, we have better democracy over here.
Even though the US is flawed, having 2 parties is massively more democratic than having 1. Because with 2, you at least have the "party in power" and "the opposition".
I'll tell you a bit about Spanish history while we're at it.
Since a bit before WWII, we had a dictatorship, with a single party. Then the dictator died at old age of natural causes and his successor was blown up by a terrorist organization. So we got democracy. At first there were only 2 parties, not because the system made it so (like in the US), but because voters voted that way. Then, people got fed up of having 2 options and were unhappy, so they started to vote for smaller parties and now we have many of them.
If people are so unhappy with having 2 options that they change their voting pattern that they've held for 40+ years, imagine how bad it is to have 1 single party.
I would rather the Republican party never be in power, or in the opposition. Their existence provides no benefit to the country whatsoever. They are corrupt, bigoted, actively anti-democratic, and militaristic. They are responsible (along with many, many democrats, I might add) for pointless wars of aggression that killed roughly a million people, and are currently supporting and supplying an ongoing genocide that's killing people at an even faster rate. They are, in every way, a detriment to the country and an impediment to democracy.
Anyone with a lick of sense and the means to do so would seek to lock them out from accessing the levers of power the moment they have the means to do so. If, in Spain, a Francoist party emerged and started gaining a bunch of corporate funding and getting closer and closer to taking over and reestablishing a dictatorship, would it be so wrong to ban such a party to prevent them from coming to power? Would the addition of such a party to Spain's political environment make the country more democratic?
As you say, after the Nationalists won the civil war, they remained in power for over 30 years, and the people lost the ability to change things through the political process, they just had to wait for the dictator to die. Those are the stakes. The enemy is more than happy to use whatever means necessary to seize power for themselves and shut everyone else out of the process in order to enact their reactionary, bigoted agenda. Such a political force should be stamped out by whatever means necessary. If they aren't, then eventually you will be forced to choose between sitting idly by as more and more innocent people are fed into the meat grinder, or sending a dictator's car over a building.
The francoist party is not ilegal in Spain. It still exists to this day, just no one votes for them. Banning them would make Spain less democratic.
The way to avoid your scenario is not to ban parties, which is hurtful for democracy (who decides what party to ban? What happens when it is your party the one that is banned?). The way to avoid it is to have laws to regulate the processes you mentioned. For example limiting political donations. Maximum campaign budgets, subsidies to small political parties that reach X% of votes, and so on.
What protects us from an undemocratic party being elected and abolishing democracy is the constitution, which requires a supermajority to change. A brexit-like vote where 51% get to massively decide the course of the country can't happen.
And if 75% or whatever (I don't know the exact %) of the people want to remove democracy, so be it, they might've figured out a better system. That's why constitutions are non immutable.
The US does not have such laws, and both major parties benefit from not having them as not having them ensures their positions without having to give the people anything. It is a system where the foxes are loose in the henhouse, the rich have near total control over the political process and can do whatever they want and there exists little to no hope of ever changing that.
In China, they have managed to avoid such an outcome. They've done so by entrenching the power of the communist party. Now, it may be that the ideal system is one with the regulations in place to allow a wider range of ideas to compete on a level playing field, but if we're just comparing those two, in the one case, capitalists have full control over the political system, and in the other, communists do. American capitalists have the same kind of ability to prevent things they don't like from happening as Chinese communists do. The only real difference I see between them is that the communists at least occasionally do things that actually help people, like eliminating poverty or taking measures to prevent the spread of COVID or investing in green energy, while the capitalists are only ever concerned with squeezing us as hard as they can and letting us die for the sake of their profits.
I don't know why you're so fixated on comparing america and china when this post is specifically about china and I already agree that america is not the pinnacle of democracy.
But if you want to compare them, they're not even in the same league. If you look at the democracy index, America is 7.85 (#29) while China is 2.12 (#48).
American capitalists don't have anywhere near the power of china's CCP. Doesn't matter how you slice it.
And don't pretend that the CCP are angels. As this post mentions, there is an ongoing genocide happening in china. They are constantly threatening an invasion on Taiwan. They brutally repress protests, and it's not like only tianmen square happened, look at Hong Kong, which was very recent. Their workers are so enslaved that they have a domestic demand issue, since their own workers can't afford to consume what they produce.
Let's not pretend china is communist either. If the workers working for pennies is not enough proof, there are 400 billionaires living in china. How does one become a billionaire in a communist state? (Spoiler: China has powerful capitalists too).
Just because they put a number to it doesn't mean you can treat that as some kind of objective measurement.
Nowhere have I done so.
No, there isn't. I'd love to see evidence to the contrary, unfortunately, every time I ask for it, I'm told that I'm a bad person and a fascist for trying to do due diligence in investigating such claims. What evidence I have seen is traced back to either hearsay, or sources directly affiliated with the CIA or US State Department.
As I said, they do some saber-rattling in their part of the world, which in no way compares to all the wars of aggression and slaughter of countless innocents conducted by the US.
When the communists came to power, the people of China were living in an unimaginable state of abject poverty. The fact that China can even be expected to have conditions on par to that of Western countries is a testament to their success. If you went back 20, 40, 60 years, the average Chinese person would be thrilled to see what the country has developed into today.
In the 80's, China enacted reforms and trade agreements that led to Western manufacturing being outsourced to China. This allowed China to industrialize and grow to the economic powerhouse that it is today. Of course, the whole appeal of the deal from the corporate side was that they could pay lower wages than they'd have to pay in the West, but it was still better that what the Chinese workers had had before.
These criticisms make no sense to me at all. Before the economic reforms under Deng, they had no billionaires. So, if that's your problem with China, then do you think they had the right idea under Mao? I doubt it. I don't think it matters at all what China does or doesn't do, anti-China people will always find a way to spin it into something negative. Even when they put aside ideological hangups and just look at what they can do to improve the conditions of the country, and succeed at it, they're still bad, just because there are are billionaires now. Of course, the party has taken measures to ensure that they are still accountable to the law and unable to control the government, but when they do that, it's "undemocratic." Literally impossible to win.
Why bother with sources if you're gonna dismiss it as "that's US propaganda" or "just a number". Can't convince someone that doesn't wanna be convinced. 🤷♂️
EDIT: china sounds so awesome and democratic! I'm gonna leave my western country so I can be truly free in china!
You can't quantify democracy and measure it objectively, sorry. The Economist is not the ultimate authority on political philosophy.
You probably shouldn't. While the standards of living have increased substantially under the communists, it's still behind that of most Western countries. It is by no means some kind of workers' paradise.
I just don't want to bomb them.