> You could just say "this is the US." I could. The best model of any thing is the thing itself. It's also the most useless model because the point of modeling

> You could just say "this is the US." I could. The best model of any thing is the thing itself. It's also the most useless model because the point of modeling is reduction of complexity for better understanding. Reducing US complexity to democracy, however, misses important aspects, namely federated sovereignty and complex power sharing arrangements between states and federal government. This gives people misleading impression that the system was supposed to work as majoritarian democracy and the fact it doesn't work that way is some kind of flaw that needs to be fixed. On the contrary, the system was explicitly designed to include elements of majoritarian democracy, but only as a limited part of it, counterbalanced by other arrangements as to protect from the deficiencies of such model. Thus, saying "it's not a democracy" highlights the deficiency of modeling the US as a simple majoritarian democracy.