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.
That’s fair, I guess. I still maintain that it’s most likely that if you were to describe the way that presidential elections here work (including the blatant flaws) to the average person without revealing which country you were describing and then asked them if they thought it was a true democracy, they’d say no.
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.
That’s fair, I guess. I still maintain that it’s most likely that if you were to describe the way that presidential elections here work (including the blatant flaws) to the average person without revealing which country you were describing and then asked them if they thought it was a true democracy, they’d say no.