We all know the U.S. election system is flawed to a point of being broken and thus democracy as we like to believe it's supposed to work doesn't even exist. But everyone just accepts that's the way it is and carries on with life because "at least it's not North Korea." If you hadn't already lost faith in the U.S. election system years ago, then you've got your head in the sand.
It might be a hard pill to swallow, but I think if Russia's plan is to make the U.S. wake up and smell the coffee, they're actually doing the U.S. people a huge favour.
He also discovered that the Carter administration's justice department had opened a criminal investigation on the NSA, and through FOIA managed to get a copy of the file. It was pretty damning stuff.
This was 1982. What changed because of this?
That was the point I was trying to make with "unignorable public fact" - "we" don't "all" "know" that, for various values of those words. Would you expect TV anchors to say things like "Well, I'm standing outside this polling place, but I'm not really sure what the point is because elections are broken"? Millions of people get involved in fighting elections like they mean it.
Consensus about this kind of thing is a real problem, because the landscape is polluted with lies and delusions.
Edit: I specifically said "lose faith in the US election", not "lose faith in the US [generally]"; it's one thing if the bad policy is the result of legitimate elections, it's quite another if either the vote is widely rigged (hacking voting machines), subject to intimidation. People ending up believing it's rigged when it actually wasn't is just as bad, it's the kind of thing that leads to political violence.
Equally I haven't lost faith in the U.S. - there are millions of amazing Americans. I've just lost faith in the U.S.'s a). ability to elect the person they really want in charge because the voting system is broken and b). the person they _do_ elect doesn't have any meaningful power anyway because the senate is purposely designed to restrict any meaningful power.
It is a Constitutional Republic with the only democratic process being the representatives you elect .... represent you ... sometimes... if they feel like it.... unless they have been bribe^H^H^H^H lobbied to do otherwise.
The only nexus between republic and democracy in this case would be the Constitutional Republican Guarantee clause. Since that has essentially never been adjudicated we can't know for certain whether - at least in Constitutional terms - a Republic does convey democratic rights.
If you elect incompetent, or corrupt, or evil representatives, it's still a democracy.
Democracy is a tyranny of majority. The founders did NOT want a democracy.
A republic is a land where political authority isn't formally heritable personal property (e.g., basically a not-monarchy), a republic can also (like the US) be a representative democracy. It can also be an authoritarian dictatorship. It can also be a direct democracy.
The laws bind it.
I suppose since the constitution is completely ignored you might have valid points.
You clearly are using "democracy" in a very peculiar sense. If you narrowly define "democracy" as "lawless mob rule", then your statement is true, but that's not what the word democracy is generally used to mean when discussing political systems.
So yes, it is a personal definition. Scholars don't use this definition. Pundits don't use this definition. The common man doesn't use this definition. It's a BS definition, and if it weren't, it would be pointless and redundant because "majority rule" captures this already.
That's where you're wrong. A democracy is a state where people have (or nominally should have) equal power to affect society's collective decisions. Not all implementations of "majority rule" meet this criterion.
Political decisions affect everyone, thus everyone should have an equal share in determining which ones we take - at least a priori.
We can cede some power if we decide that a certain class of questions are none of our business (for instance, delegate some decisions to a local level, or give Sharia courts jurisdiction over their adherents to take an uglier example). Or declare that some questions are non-political in nature, and should be decided by some sort of experts. But the decision about what is our own business must always be our own business.
Another way of saying the same is that all legitimate government comes from the people - as opposed to e.g. the divine right of kings, or a "natural" aristocracy.
How can you have that without at least a one line constitution that says, more or less, "The majority rules"? You beg the question, sir.
You very narrow definition of "democracy", majority rule without a constitution, isn't possible. Thus your definition is useless and therefor meaningless.
What matters is what the people want now and for the future of their United States... are you going to live forever more adhering to the rules of dead people? Seems er... pointless.
No. If you democratically elect terrible representatives who eat puppies, it's still democratic.
> Also, what about federal judges? None of those are democratically elected, and they get to interpret all the laws in ways that have great consequence.
You don't have to elect every government official for it to be a representative democracy. Democracy means that the ultimate power is vested in the people. If you elect representatives who appoint judges, the judges are still appointed by the power of the people.
> Hence, America's government is a little more complicated than "democracy", although some parts of it are surely "democratic" (e.g. the house of reps).
No government is simple. America is very clearly not a direct democracy, nor are all officials elected, but it is still a democracy.
[1] A citizen was considered to be any person born of Greece, white and male.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy
I doubt that the Athenians had the present-day concept of "white people". Wikipedia says that citizens "had to be descended from citizens", so maybe at least in a certain era nobody known to be descended from people coming from outside of Athens could be a citizen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Citizenship...
Edit: looking at one of the references, it seems that there was a year when explicit citizenship lists were drawn up based on all free men who lived in Athens (maybe with some kind of ethnic exclusion at that time too?). From then on until Pericles, children could be added to the list if their fathers were on the list. After Pericles, children could be added to the list if their mothers and fathers were on the list.
Most importantly, while there were a few questions settled by referendum where all citizens could vote, most were settled by randomly allotted juries. This meant there was little advantage to forming political parties around popular demagogues, or run well-funded propaganda campaigns.
Athenian democracy got knocked down many times and came back every time, except the last. The second-to-last time, a bunch of immigrants had fought for the liberation and restoration of democracy, and some leaders argued forcefully that they should be awarded citizenship for this. But they didn't get it, the existing citizens voted against.
The reason democracy finally failed was probably this. The Athenians knew (especially the poor) just how unusual and lucky they were to have political freedom, so they were fiercely protective of it - and didn't want to dilute it by sharing it. Eventually a large part of their society had so little stake in democracy that they didn't bother to restore it.
Because it is designed as a (representative) democracy. Its also a federal republic whose constituent units are mostly-representative [but some with significant aspects of direct] democracies.
They absolutely do represent you.
What do you think the representatives doing when they're trying to fuel up the corporations in your district? They're representing your interests by making sure that the jobs stay where they are, just not the interest of the American people.
The senators represent the state's interest, the representatives represent the district's interest.
Can someone fill me in?
The only check on this is the separation of powers, and even then, career politicians, special interests, and tons of money have way too much influence. Add in the fact that the press were supposed to be the check on government and now they're firmly in bed with the political parties. All you get is the incredibly slanted, biased, and spun stories to influence you so all you get is their viewpoint. I can't imagine how I would see the world if I only read the New York Times and only watched MSNBC.
If some of the fringe third parties would all come together and find a common platform, it would certainly replace my faith in the current system.
The "establishment" Democrats were the same except they succeeded in placing their candidate ahead of what many believe their base really wanted.
They aren't Brazil either, or even most places in Europe.
Were I an US citizen, I'd be very wary of people trying to fix Democracy¹. They have a pretty good quality of life, and any attempted change can go very badly very easily - the more "let's fix things" is the change, the easier it could go badly.
1 - Hell, I'm wary of them here at Brazil! Because, you know, we aren't North Korea either, nor Venezuela. That said, we recently got a very good and very safe fix applied - the trick is that nobody was claiming it was a fix for Democracy, it was some people "just doing their work" on unforeseen ways.
Far too many voting machines are still insecure, and one of the candidates is pre-accusing the other of fixing the election.
And yes, there's also some propaganda for not fixing it at all. That's what support voting machines (at least here). But, again, how do you fix the problem that makes propaganda viable?
For the specific problem of voting machines, candidates accusing others may be the best avenue for moving people in the correct direction.
And they always will be. It's impossible to have a secure voting machine.
rolls eyes, adjust your tinfoil hat.
Look, even if you believe that dark, unseen forces control the world using the US as a conduit - it would appear that the world has been the better for it. Given a choice of world management between Russian and US in this regard, the choice is pretty straightforward.
People who complain about Europe, the US and the general Western alliances management of the world are selling a pretty ugly alternative.
[1] http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html
I don't think it's entirely black and white in the other direction either but your comment strikes me as crass and indifferent towards human life, dehumanizing, confusing people with their larger society and government.
It's interesting that you choose to use the word "management" here - we in other countries are not left to make our own decisions, they're "managed".
If you believe all that, you have to consider the results of Putin's Russia: Oligarchy & Nationalization, direct imperialism (Ukraine), the support of extremists/facists in foreign countries...
That doesn't make it OK for the US to do it as well! This is what I meant by "false dichotomy". If anything, the US (and especially UK) use of domestic surveillance and extraterritorial interference makes it harder for us to argue that Russia should not do those things either.
Even within that audience which implicitly accepts the government is more directly engaged in protection of sovereignty via clandestine means against it's own citizens -- that audience should probably consider the goals of the sources.
That assumes that we 'the people' are part of the equation. We aren't. This looks like standard gamesmanship between intelligence agencies. They operate in a world above the cares and needs of the common people. Such messages normally pass quietly through known channels (servers known by both sides). The going public says to me that the message wasn't getting through, or wasn't being taken seriously by the right people. This is about communicating intention to someone who, perhaps, needed to be publicly shamed in order that they take the situation seriously. That would fit the pattern of many 'cold war' spy games.
(+) "unignorable public fact" is a clunky way of expressing it, but I mean something that you can bring up in a news report and politicians discuss what the appropriate reaction is, rather than challenging the fact itself. This is getting increasingly rare.