Given the extreme aggressive voting restrictions, gerrymandering, etc, I'm not really comfortable calling the US a democracy either.

Some refer to the U.S. as a managed democracy and view the U.S. in totalitarian terms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

There are systematic measures political scientists use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House

It's a shame that Durov can start off with "there are many studies" and not cite any of them. What?

Freedom House is funded in part by the State Department, USNED and USAID and have participated in multiple covert operations and openly biased campaigns. Check the Criticism section of the article you linked and then look into their funding.

Yes, and political scientists are aware of that. Note that much of the criticism is political: China, Russia, Iran.

It definitely favors the west but despite the bogeyman a lot of academics just want good data. It also is not rating the US especially high.

And what would happen if the rated them mich lower? They'd lose their funding and cease to exist is what.

And despite all that, most of the choices are just "red team or blue team?" anyway.

What's wrong with just red team or blue team? As long as they're both competing for your vote and not colluding, it sounds like a pretty good way of establishing what popular opinion is. They're not static. When public opinion changes, they have to adapt to maintain their competitiveness.

Even people who unthinkingly vote for the same party no matter what are just cancelled out by their counterparts and are effectively abstaining. That's helpful because they didn't vote intelligently anyway.

> What's wrong with just red team or blue team?

Because people care about different things and don't always align neatly with party policies.

Suppose I care deeply about both gun rights and abortion rights. Who do I vote for? Pluralistic systems with proportional representation are better at reflecting the values of the electorate.

> As long as they're both competing for your vote and not colluding...

Now say I want to tax the rich. That's got strong bipartisan opposition. Who do I vote for?

What's wrong with it is that I can't vote for anyone that I share some views that are important to me with, unlike in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, etc. I'm forced into choosing between two parties which both propose many of the same things that I oppose. Whether they are colluding or not, they're identical on many policies that many people oppose and there is no alternative.

On your second point, you assume there are an equal number of tribalists without any data on that. It's beside the point anyway.

> and not colluding

Are we sure? they are both funded by the same corporate lobbyists...

"What's wrong with only having the choice between a hamburger and a cheeseburger if both aren't actively poisoning you."

The obvious answer is, what if I want neither?

From where I'm standing, it sure looks like buying off both sides is a pretty easy/predictable way to protect the status quo.

Rather than rehash all the obvious fairness and consent of the governed talking points, which you are certainly already aware of, I'll speak to election integrity.

FPTP form of elections are both brittle and very high stakes. Begetting our insane polarization.

Switching from FPTP to approval voting would greatly improve the robustness.

Switching to proportional representation would greatly reduce the stakes.

Try expressing yourself with answering n questions with a single yes/no answer that has to apply to all at once. You can't even order a family pizza that way; no matter how you align yes/no boundaries there is huge compression loss, and a massive dependence on whoever picks the questions and the boundaries.

Its still democracy. The so called "Madisonian" strain of democracy [0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/AbFlYLHOSKU

The relentless sabotaging of majoritarian rule is entirely unrelated to the separation of powers.

Don't forget our lovely Australia, it's quickly becoming the totalitarian madness in the making https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLTGXblgUoc

Are you Australian?

Nope, I'm glad that I am not

Formally Russia is. Of course the reality is a bit different but they still do a lot of things that would not fly in China.

And yes every country gets worse over the time.

> every country gets worse over the time.

How did we get democracy in the first place?

After long centuries of tyranny. Unfortunately many decades of democracy has made everything think it is the natural order of things and nothing more needs to be done. But actually non-democratic forces and democracy are always in a dynamic balance that can swing to either side if we don't keep giving active counter-force.

A lot of death, in most cases.

Don't know about other countries, but even if Putin did not rig presidential elections (which he does), he'd still be winning overwhelming majorities. He enjoys strong popular support. So we can quibble about whether rigging an election you'd win anyway is a departure from "democracy" (whatever that means), but he's still a democratically elected leader, as well as the best leader Russia had in the last hundred years.

PS. I always vote against him every time he runs. I think there should be term limits, and I didn't "get" him early on. His results are hard to argue against. At a very minimum (and unlike in the US) the oligarchs don't overtly own the parliament (duma) anymore, and the standard of living has improved massively.

He enjoys popular support partially because people feel like there's no point and because he poisons his political opponents.

A Soros puppet? Please explain. Let's get some sources for this, whatever the hell a "Soros puppet" actually means beyond dogwhistling

It's a smear perpetuated by Putin: https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/22/turns-out-you-cant-trus...

"Soros" figuratively speaking, although I would not be surprised - good ol' George tends to have his fingers in a lot of pies worldwide, and this is a tasty one. Navalny had to declare himself and his fund as "foreign agent" because he took funding from abroad. Which is OK under Russian law, as long as you always state you're a foreign agent (this is required by law if someone writes about you in the news for example).

It'd be strange, I think you'll agree, to run for the top political office in the country after doing that. But even if he did run, he would not get anything above single digit percentage of support, basically some particularly liberal part of liberal elite in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

I think a lot of people (myself included) sympathise with his anti-corruption work, even though it has zero effect. But even the sympathizers know that politically he has zero prospects in any high level election there even if everything was fair and square (which it is not). The West, on the other hand, is gaslit into believing that he's Putin's arch-nemesis or something, and Putin is losing any sleep over his existence or activity. As they say in Russia: as a dog barks, the caravan goes on.

Here's another thing people in the West don't know about him: he's a nationalist and a xenophobe (he shares that with most Russian people, but he's considerably more extreme in his views), but I wonder if his curators from USAID know that. Here he is in 2011 speaking from the stage at a nationalist Russian March: https://youtu.be/BYMbYwL8sQA?t=511. To US folks, this is like Charlottesville, but without the opposing side. "Jews will not replace us" and everything. Plenty of "skinheads" in the crowd. You only don't see swastikas there because they're illegal to show in Russia.

So TL;DR: Navalny is a complicated man at best. And he's not, and will never be Putin's "rival".

> He enjoys strong popular support.

He us working hard to make you believe that.

I actually have quite a few friends and family there. They all support him, some begrudgingly (as in "we know he's a crook and a thief, but comparatively speaking, he's doing a pretty good job"), some enthusiastically. So between first hand knowledge and Western propaganda, I think it's prudent to choose first hand knowledge, at least for me, who has it.

I have friends and family in Russia and their attitude to Putin ranges from active ignorance to hatred.

Everyone agrees that he serves as a bad example to follow.

So yes, first hand knowledge may fail you.

They're probably in Moscow or something. The vast majority of my folks aren't. Moscow and Saint Petersburg are only 10% of Russia's population - they don't matter much when it comes to electing the president.

Canada, UK, France, Germany are not more authoritarian than before?

If anything, these countries (^) have had a bigger growth in authoritarianism than US,Russia,China in the past ~decade.You just don't hear about it because the press in W.E is so biased you probably get more reporting in some parts of China(HK) and Russia.(due to the US press there) Frankly, EU(28*),Canada, AUS and NZ derailed the most when it comes to tyrannical laws, privacy, transparency of leadership, etc. US,Russia & China have been like this for a while now, if not ~ever (in modern history at least). If anything, China has been de facto becoming more and more fascist(incorporating into its government and state body the rapid-growing companies that rose due to capitalism, ironically)

I think you're probably right, but you chose some strange examples. I would have said Canada, New Zealand, Australia, UK, Italy, France. US authoritarianism is largely limited to blue states.

Edit: to put a finer point on it, Canada, NZ and Australia all seem to be post-democratic, post-constitutional medical police states. If you disagree with that description, please respond with what exactly they lack to be properly described that way.