Ask Lemmy

When was the US the last time a democracy?

You can vote democrats or republicans, which mostly get bankrolled by the same rich assholes. As a normal citizen of the US you have almost no influence at politics at all, because the media is controlled by rich people, the biggest internet platforms are controlled by rich people, elections are paid for by rich people, ...

The current situation is not a spontaneous, miraculous, magical result of Trump and his gang, it was years in the making by lobby groups, influential/rich/powerful people and neo liberal brainwashing of the masses.

Same holds true for most other western so called democracies.

Not since after I saw this graph:

From this paper:

https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc/page/n7/mode/1up

This was published in 2014, back when Obama was in office.

The institutions are completely captured. Yes, even the ones you thought were on your side all this time.

Absolutely not. When laws don't apply to the president, the jig is up. Trump clearly plans to be in power forever. Either there won't be elections or they'll be rigged.

Nope. I see it as an autocracy run by an elite oligarchy.

I still believe there are democracies in America but the US of A aren't one of them.

Not for quite some time now. Not since I learned about the electoral college.

Noper....

The short answer: yes.

The long answer: it will take a long time to completely dismantle a democracy in a country as big and complex as America. You don't just do that in three months.

All trump has done so far is move as fast as possible to make as much of a mess as possible in the hopes that some of his nutty ideas goes through once the system catches up to him. And the system will catch up to him and Musk and all the other cunts who are having their little ego fest currently.

I have patience. Kind of. I look forward to seeing the consequences of their actions come to haunt them. I also hope this period in American politics will be the wake up call America needs to hopefully bar politicians and political parties from taking donations from big corps essentially try to buy the government and weaken true democracy from flourishing. The US isn't the only country with this problem, but it is certainly neck deep in one of the worst outcomes of letting big corporations take ownership of a government.

No and it hasn't been for a long time. As long as you can buy influence via lobbying then the playing field is not level.

The difference this time is they are not trying to hide it anymore

On paper, I guess so? In reality, and as is the case with pretty much every developed democracy, money and technology make a mockery of the whole idea. A society in which billionaires can buy their way into the Whitehouse - literally - is no democracy.

Would be nice to know what part of America you mean by that. It is a pretty big continent you know? Argentinians, Mexicans, Brasilians and so on are all part of America.

Buuuut I'm gonna go ahead and assume you are asking about the UNITED STATES country, right?

Yes it is a Democracy. Not perfect, but then again which one is?

Canadian here.

Before Trump? Ehhh, not really. I've always viewed the US as a place where you vote for which oligarch-backed monarch you'd want to put in absolute power for 4 years. Every 4/8 years the new incoming overlord just rips up whatever the previous one did and nothing of substance is actually achieved.

After Trump 2.0? No. There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Trump is going to surrender all that power he and the GOP have accumulated. And why would he? He doesn't have to. He literally controls every branch of government that he can and ignores those that he doesn't. If the US ever has another election it will purely be for show, like China's elections. The mask is now fully off and the charade of US democracy is over as those who actually wield the power now do so openly on their sleeves.

lol

Anyone who is eligible to vote, and chooses not to, implicitly throws their support behind whoever wins.

On 2024-11-05, ⅔ of US citizens who were eligible to vote told the rest of the world they don’t want to be taken seriously for at least 2 years.

The US had always been a questionable democracy with the hyperfixation on the president and just two parties setting the agenda, but I'd argue that it's still a democracy, though it is a rapidly deteriorating one.

still consider

It has only two political parties, and a weird system where all votes are not equal and the actual vote majority doesn't always win.

It has frequently had multiple people from the same families running for office, and only wealthy people have a shot. Corporations get to lobby for laws in their favour.

It also spies on its own citizens, holds people indefinitely without trial, has a huge prison population, a militarized police with a high homicide rate, and is the only western nation with the death penalty.

Trump and Musk are laying bare how fragile the veneer of "democracy" really is in that country.

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.

Am Dutch. I have considered the US an incomplete democracy since I learned about voting in school. It’s not one person one vote, which to me is crucial for a democracy. The US right now is still a nation of laws, but democracy is sharply in decline. The voter-roll issues and Gerrymandering come to mind immediately. Not to mention the fact that guaranteed access to polls has been pulled by the courts. Which is insane to me.

No. And I haven't for a while now. Looking at your electoral system (electoral college, gerrymandering etc.), it probably never was but it was never as obvious as it is now.

See, as a German, when I see a country go down the same route as the Weimar Republic after handing over the power to the Nazi party, I think it's just very obvious. Hitler took some two months to completely destroy democracy, and the US are juuust in the middle of that. History doesn't repeat, but sometimes it rhymes, and the similarities are just remarkable.

So yeah, I guess that would be a big fat trench in the sand.

For the time being, sure. I dint think democracy is a binary. Democracy doesn't imply a fair system or universal suffrage or a system where power is split.

Like for example the Vatican is a absolute monarchy and also a democracy.

I consider it a lesser democracy / something that barely qualifies for a few years now.

Line in the sand? Going after political opponents. Censoring information. Dismantling media. Abandoning rule of law. Business and government mixing too much.

USA is speed running these.

Ignoring court orders, and "fake national emergency declarations" to create war and international extortion and remove rights and citizenships for deportations crossed the line. The voter suppression/rigging that won election for Trump is also clearly anti-democratic, but anti-democratic as usual. Media/oligarchy/Israel influence/disinformation might not make for an ideal democracy, but also "democracy as usual".

The big problem with the world is the US empire's manufacturing of hatred/war against "those who are less democratic than us and our colonies" Corruption of democracy in US, who can cheaply manipulate democracy in its colonies, means that you don't have functional democracy either. US praises the most violently oppressive apartheid ethnostates suspending federal and local elections as great democracies if they support US wars. There is something wrong when the most important issue of your government is to increase divisiveness/threats to the US's enemies when the US unjustifiably threatens you, and that thrills you as right track.

So, democracy is simply not working at bringing progressiveness and shared prosperity, or even the most basic understanding of humanist/national interests, to those who say they love it so much. This is global collapse level of delusion. Nations doing best economically are those distancing themselves from US colonial control.

The more objective measure of "good government" is control against oligarchist pillaging, while having pluralism/sustainability, and economic constructiveness. US approved democracies are failing hard on these metrics. Warmongering based on "blanket, evidence free, refusal to accept election results when non-CIA candidate wins" is not the democratic/liberal ideal you think it is.

A struggling democracy, in the beginning of an Orban/Hungary-like overtake of the country.

Its possible to revert, but you seem to have atleast a 1/3 of the country that would walk down a straight up facist line willingly and happily do so.

You need to fix your shit america.

It was never a democracy.