9 ms·

> You need a well-educated population with equal access to opportunities, a free, healthy, and diverse press, an independent judiciary, a healthy political land

by lawn 6y ago

> You need a well-educated population with equal access to opportunities, a free, healthy, and diverse press, an independent judiciary, a healthy political landscape, etc. Then the US isn't a democracy?

praptak 6y ago
It is a somewhat flawed democracy.
- tectec 6y ago
  As is every democracy.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Not only somewhat, but critically: increasingly.
luisfmh 6y ago
Yeah, I would argue it isn't. It's at least not a healthy democracy.
pensatoio 6y ago
The United States is not a democracy. It’s a democratic republic. The founders explicitly did not want to create a democracy.
- antientropic 6y ago
  Please not this misguided pedantry. A country can be a republic and a democracy. Those terms are not mutually exclusive.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Moreover, by the conventional definition of democracy (government legitimacy derives from the votes of some subset of the population) all republics are necessarily democracies.
  - pensatoio 6y ago
    I didn't write this frivolously. There are people marching through the streets chanting, "this is what democracy looks like." They don rose-tinted glasses - projecting their mob rule fantasy of popular vote and pure democracy on our explicitly democratic republic. Words have meaning. It's not misguided pedantry.
- minerjoe 6y ago
  Wasn't there a paper a while back that showed how the US is more than likely a plutocracy.
  - ModernMech 6y ago
    These days it's closer to a pathocracy: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201907/pathocracy https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201...
  - some1else 6y ago
    You might be thinking of the Princeton study which determined that policy is mainly influenced by wealthy interest groups[1]. The conclusions rang true with how a lot of people see the system operate in the past century. Interestingly enough, this was ranking higher in search results, when I was looking for a link to the study itself[2]: "Remember that study saying America is an oligarchy? 3 rebuttals say it's wrong." Worth noting that the VOX article finds high agreement between the rich and middle class, while the lower class appears to get their policies enacted in less than one fifth of the cases. [1]: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi... [2]: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-...
- harimau777 6y ago
  As I understand it, "democracy" can be used narrowly to mean a direct democracy, more broadly to mean a range of democratic political systems (e.g. constitutional republics, constitutional monarchies, etc.), or even more broadly to mean the overall philosophy and approach to government associated with liberal democracy. It's sort of like how functional programming can just mean "programming with pure, mathematical style functions" or more broadly it can mean the techniques associated with functional programming like pattern matching, currying, etc. In this case, it seems to me that the intention was to use the most broad sense of democracy.
- jfk13 6y ago
  Besides this being unhelpful "misguided pedantry", there's also the issue that what the founders wanted to create and what exists today are not necessarily the same.
- kergonath 6y ago
  A republic is a way to organise a state and its government (with elected head of state and a kind of legislative or governing assembly). In a representative democracy, the people doing the governing and the legislating are elected by the citizens who grant them legitimacy. You can have democratic (e.g. Iceland) or oligarchic republics (e.g. Ukraine), all the way to dictatorships (e.g. Russia). Being a democracy and being a republic are completely orthogonal.
linuxftw 6y ago
Constitutionally speaking, all states must be a republican form of government. The federal government is also republican.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  A republic is a kind of democracy. HN is not somewhere I would have expected to see people forgetting about the existence of subtypes.
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    Strictly speaking, the early us was more of an Aristocratic Republic rather than a democratic republic. > The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states, and the electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature. Article 1, Section 2. In the Early US, only white male land owners could vote (the upper class, aka, the aristocracy). Inasmuch, it was not what most people would consider a democracy. The lower class had no representation whatsoever. So, when you say that a "A republic is a kind of democracy" it's actually not true, at least not for what most people would consider democracy.
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      > the upper class, aka, the aristocracy It was a bit wider than that, the US was notable at the time for a highly unusual degree of land ownership. After all, there was a lot of land to steal from the native americans. Regardless, the US was a democracy before women could vote, and it was a democracy before black people could vote, and it was a democracy before non-landowners could vote. It was a democracy in which many inhabitants didn't truly have full citizenship, but to this day there are millions and millions of people who live in the US (including many citizens!) who cannot vote, and it's still a democracy.
formerly_proven 6y ago
The US is part first world, part third world: parts of it are a working federalized democracy, other parts not so much.
gwd 6y ago
> A report by the The Economist Intelligence Unit, released today, reveals a host of unsettling statistics about the scope of democracy around the globe. One such fact — that for the first time ever, the United States is no longer considered a “full democracy,” but rather a “flawed democracy”... The US designation as a “flawed democracy” is really more nominal than anything, simply meaning that the country’s Democracy Index — which is based off of five categories related to governance — has fallen below eight out of 10. https://www.globalcitizen.org/fr/content/the-us-is-now-a-flawed-democracy/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/fr/content/the-us-is-now-a-fla...
- mpweiher 6y ago
  And that was 2017. It hasn't gotten better since.
- yostrovs 6y ago
  What changed to make it drop? The voting system in the U.S. hasn't changed, the first amendment is still in effect, media is independent (no equivalent of DW or BBC). I'm trying to find out what aspects did change to cause a ranking drop.
  - vharuck 6y ago
    According to the report's summary, it was a drop in citizens' trust of the government: https://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=DemocracyIndex2016 https://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=De...
    - malandrew 6y ago
      This is kind of ironic because one of the reasons the US and its government has generally been as successful is because of a distrust of democracy and the government. Democracy is just another term for mob rule. Just because it is rule by the will of the majority doesn't mean it is flawless. For example, a true democracy also has the ability to vote away the democracy. What the founders realized is that most forms of government had their problems so they set up a system of checks and balances to curb the worst of various styles of government they considered. People from lesser populated regions can't trust a government based on population and people from highly populated regions can't trust a government based on equal geographic representation. Marry the two ideas to mitigate the impact of government. Government is an institution that can never be just trusted because at the end of the day it's run by people, who may or may not have your best interests at heart.
strgcmc 6y ago
Some interesting scholarship on this has happened in the last 5-6 years: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-... TLDR: it's pretty debatable
TallGuyShort 6y ago
I would say 90% of my US-based Facebook friends fall into one of two groups at any one time: posting things about how "we're not a democracy, we're a republic", and posting things about how we should suspend things in the Bill of Rights because we've been needing to exercise "emergency powers" continuously for the last 20 years. Let's ask ourselves: what do you think is the probability a year from now that the US presidential election later this year will be contested by a significant portion of the country, regardless of the outcome?
- ghettoCoder 6y ago
  Why look to the future? The last election has been openly opposed by a large percentage of the population AND agencies of the public service. Not like the Obama terms where much different. Just a different group of people saying "My team didn't win so I'm going to have a tantrum". I predict the next election cycle will just be more of the same, no matter who wins.
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    Would the election being contested by the losing candidate be more of the same to you? Because there's a massive difference between voters being upset their candidate lost, and the candidate not accepting the results. Especially if that candidate is the acting president and refuses to go through the peaceful transfer of power. And the fact it's even being discussed as a serious possibility that the current acting president would do that should raise so many alarm bells about how democratic the US really is ... it's not even funny.
    - iso1631 6y ago
      > And the fact it's even being discussed as a serious possibility that the current acting president would do that should raise so many alarm bells about how democratic the US really is ... it's not even funny. That was discussed with the same seriousness by the other side with Obama stepping down. Complete load of tosh. If the electoral college fails to elect Trump as president when it meets at the end of the year, the secret service and/or army will remove Trump and Pence from the White House at noon on Jan 20th, revoking their security clearences. That will be done by force if necessary, and the winner of the EC will take the presidency. If the EC fails to meet before Jan 20th for whatever reason (including elections being unable to be held etc), Then at noon on Jan 20th both Trump and Pence are removed and (baring a change in the makeup of the House), Nancy Pelosi will be sworn in as President. The idea of a military coup in a country so enamoured by its constitution is fantastical.
nabla9 6y ago
Binary is/is-not is not correct way to think about that. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index there are 22 full democracies. The US is flawed democracy (rank 25) http://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index http://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
The practical test isn't the political system. Voting alone certainly isn't the definition of democracy. It's the distribution of benefits that accumulate within the system, and also the ease with which costs/hindrances/outright abuse can be inflicted on selected elements in the population. The more concentrated the benefits, and the easier and more violent the restrictions and abuse, the less democracy exists.
kungato 6y ago
The US is a joke and the rest of the free world is having a laugh
- dclowd9901 6y ago
  You say this like most of us don’t know.
lisper 6y ago
> Then the US isn't a democracy? It is teetering on the brink. https://www.salon.com/2020/07/23/ruth-ben-ghiat-on-trump-and-the-bitter-american-truth-we-do-not-have-a-real-democracy/ https://www.salon.com/2020/07/23/ruth-ben-ghiat-on-trump-and...
dclowd9901 6y ago
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. It’s absolutely true that the US is losing its grip on a democracy due to these factors becoming issues.
groby_b 6y ago
It's at the very least debatable. It always has been, viz the entire Internet smart people brigade trotting out the "It's not a democracy, it's a republic" trope. But even if we set this aside, we can certainly question if an institution like the electoral college doesn't deliberately move power from the people to the ruling group. We can question if the extreme form of gerrymandering we practice around here doesn't remove power from the people. We can debate Citizens United. We can debate the existence of blatantly partisan media, and the monoculture of media owners. We can debate a regime that has clearly abandoned ethical delineations, and that values loyalty over competence. All of these, individually, chip away at democracy. The question is if together they've chipped away enough that we aren't one any more. (My current assessment is that we still have a small window to turn this around, but it's closing. It's open wider than in Hungary, it's less wide open than in Germany or France)
AxiomCloNe 6y ago
Noam Chomsky's been saying the US isn't a democracy since the 70's? Post ww2? I'm early in my introduction to him so it's fuzzy. Statistically, the laws passed and the actions the government takes are primarily influenced by corporations, thus making it a plutocracy.
Geezus_42 6y ago
The U. S. has never been a true democracy. It was founded as a democratic republic.

by lawn 6y ago

praptak 6y ago

It is a somewhat flawed democracy.

tectec 6y ago
As is every democracy.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Not only somewhat, but critically: increasingly.

luisfmh 6y ago

Yeah, I would argue it isn't. It's at least not a healthy democracy.

pensatoio 6y ago

The United States is not a democracy. It’s a democratic republic. The founders explicitly did not want to create a democracy.

antientropic 6y ago
Please not this misguided pedantry. A country can be a republic and a democracy. Those terms are not mutually exclusive.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Moreover, by the conventional definition of democracy (government legitimacy derives from the votes of some subset of the population) all republics are necessarily democracies.
- pensatoio 6y ago
  I didn't write this frivolously. There are people marching through the streets chanting, "this is what democracy looks like." They don rose-tinted glasses - projecting their mob rule fantasy of popular vote and pure democracy on our explicitly democratic republic. Words have meaning. It's not misguided pedantry.
minerjoe 6y ago
Wasn't there a paper a while back that showed how the US is more than likely a plutocracy.
- ModernMech 6y ago
  These days it's closer to a pathocracy: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201907/pathocracy https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201...
- some1else 6y ago
  You might be thinking of the Princeton study which determined that policy is mainly influenced by wealthy interest groups[1]. The conclusions rang true with how a lot of people see the system operate in the past century. Interestingly enough, this was ranking higher in search results, when I was looking for a link to the study itself[2]: "Remember that study saying America is an oligarchy? 3 rebuttals say it's wrong." Worth noting that the VOX article finds high agreement between the rich and middle class, while the lower class appears to get their policies enacted in less than one fifth of the cases. [1]: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi... [2]: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-...
harimau777 6y ago
As I understand it, "democracy" can be used narrowly to mean a direct democracy, more broadly to mean a range of democratic political systems (e.g. constitutional republics, constitutional monarchies, etc.), or even more broadly to mean the overall philosophy and approach to government associated with liberal democracy. It's sort of like how functional programming can just mean "programming with pure, mathematical style functions" or more broadly it can mean the techniques associated with functional programming like pattern matching, currying, etc. In this case, it seems to me that the intention was to use the most broad sense of democracy.
jfk13 6y ago
Besides this being unhelpful "misguided pedantry", there's also the issue that what the founders wanted to create and what exists today are not necessarily the same.
kergonath 6y ago
A republic is a way to organise a state and its government (with elected head of state and a kind of legislative or governing assembly). In a representative democracy, the people doing the governing and the legislating are elected by the citizens who grant them legitimacy. You can have democratic (e.g. Iceland) or oligarchic republics (e.g. Ukraine), all the way to dictatorships (e.g. Russia). Being a democracy and being a republic are completely orthogonal.

linuxftw 6y ago

Constitutionally speaking, all states must be a republican form of government. The federal government is also republican.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
A republic is a kind of democracy. HN is not somewhere I would have expected to see people forgetting about the existence of subtypes.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  Strictly speaking, the early us was more of an Aristocratic Republic rather than a democratic republic. > The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states, and the electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature. Article 1, Section 2. In the Early US, only white male land owners could vote (the upper class, aka, the aristocracy). Inasmuch, it was not what most people would consider a democracy. The lower class had no representation whatsoever. So, when you say that a "A republic is a kind of democracy" it's actually not true, at least not for what most people would consider democracy.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    > the upper class, aka, the aristocracy It was a bit wider than that, the US was notable at the time for a highly unusual degree of land ownership. After all, there was a lot of land to steal from the native americans. Regardless, the US was a democracy before women could vote, and it was a democracy before black people could vote, and it was a democracy before non-landowners could vote. It was a democracy in which many inhabitants didn't truly have full citizenship, but to this day there are millions and millions of people who live in the US (including many citizens!) who cannot vote, and it's still a democracy.

formerly_proven 6y ago

The US is part first world, part third world: parts of it are a working federalized democracy, other parts not so much.

gwd 6y ago

> A report by the The Economist Intelligence Unit, released today, reveals a host of unsettling statistics about the scope of democracy around the globe. One such fact — that for the first time ever, the United States is no longer considered a “full democracy,” but rather a “flawed democracy”... The US designation as a “flawed democracy” is really more nominal than anything, simply meaning that the country’s Democracy Index — which is based off of five categories related to governance — has fallen below eight out of 10. https://www.globalcitizen.org/fr/content/the-us-is-now-a-flawed-democracy/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/fr/content/the-us-is-now-a-fla...

mpweiher 6y ago
And that was 2017. It hasn't gotten better since.
yostrovs 6y ago
What changed to make it drop? The voting system in the U.S. hasn't changed, the first amendment is still in effect, media is independent (no equivalent of DW or BBC). I'm trying to find out what aspects did change to cause a ranking drop.
- vharuck 6y ago
  According to the report's summary, it was a drop in citizens' trust of the government: https://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=DemocracyIndex2016 https://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=De...
  - malandrew 6y ago
    This is kind of ironic because one of the reasons the US and its government has generally been as successful is because of a distrust of democracy and the government. Democracy is just another term for mob rule. Just because it is rule by the will of the majority doesn't mean it is flawless. For example, a true democracy also has the ability to vote away the democracy. What the founders realized is that most forms of government had their problems so they set up a system of checks and balances to curb the worst of various styles of government they considered. People from lesser populated regions can't trust a government based on population and people from highly populated regions can't trust a government based on equal geographic representation. Marry the two ideas to mitigate the impact of government. Government is an institution that can never be just trusted because at the end of the day it's run by people, who may or may not have your best interests at heart.

strgcmc 6y ago

Some interesting scholarship on this has happened in the last 5-6 years: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-... TLDR: it's pretty debatable

TallGuyShort 6y ago

I would say 90% of my US-based Facebook friends fall into one of two groups at any one time: posting things about how "we're not a democracy, we're a republic", and posting things about how we should suspend things in the Bill of Rights because we've been needing to exercise "emergency powers" continuously for the last 20 years. Let's ask ourselves: what do you think is the probability a year from now that the US presidential election later this year will be contested by a significant portion of the country, regardless of the outcome?

ghettoCoder 6y ago
Why look to the future? The last election has been openly opposed by a large percentage of the population AND agencies of the public service. Not like the Obama terms where much different. Just a different group of people saying "My team didn't win so I'm going to have a tantrum". I predict the next election cycle will just be more of the same, no matter who wins.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  Would the election being contested by the losing candidate be more of the same to you? Because there's a massive difference between voters being upset their candidate lost, and the candidate not accepting the results. Especially if that candidate is the acting president and refuses to go through the peaceful transfer of power. And the fact it's even being discussed as a serious possibility that the current acting president would do that should raise so many alarm bells about how democratic the US really is ... it's not even funny.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    > And the fact it's even being discussed as a serious possibility that the current acting president would do that should raise so many alarm bells about how democratic the US really is ... it's not even funny. That was discussed with the same seriousness by the other side with Obama stepping down. Complete load of tosh. If the electoral college fails to elect Trump as president when it meets at the end of the year, the secret service and/or army will remove Trump and Pence from the White House at noon on Jan 20th, revoking their security clearences. That will be done by force if necessary, and the winner of the EC will take the presidency. If the EC fails to meet before Jan 20th for whatever reason (including elections being unable to be held etc), Then at noon on Jan 20th both Trump and Pence are removed and (baring a change in the makeup of the House), Nancy Pelosi will be sworn in as President. The idea of a military coup in a country so enamoured by its constitution is fantastical.

nabla9 6y ago

Binary is/is-not is not correct way to think about that. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index there are 22 full democracies. The US is flawed democracy (rank 25) http://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index http://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

The practical test isn't the political system. Voting alone certainly isn't the definition of democracy. It's the distribution of benefits that accumulate within the system, and also the ease with which costs/hindrances/outright abuse can be inflicted on selected elements in the population. The more concentrated the benefits, and the easier and more violent the restrictions and abuse, the less democracy exists.

kungato 6y ago

The US is a joke and the rest of the free world is having a laugh

dclowd9901 6y ago
You say this like most of us don’t know.

lisper 6y ago

> Then the US isn't a democracy? It is teetering on the brink. https://www.salon.com/2020/07/23/ruth-ben-ghiat-on-trump-and-the-bitter-american-truth-we-do-not-have-a-real-democracy/ https://www.salon.com/2020/07/23/ruth-ben-ghiat-on-trump-and...

dclowd9901 6y ago

I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. It’s absolutely true that the US is losing its grip on a democracy due to these factors becoming issues.

groby_b 6y ago

It's at the very least debatable. It always has been, viz the entire Internet smart people brigade trotting out the "It's not a democracy, it's a republic" trope. But even if we set this aside, we can certainly question if an institution like the electoral college doesn't deliberately move power from the people to the ruling group. We can question if the extreme form of gerrymandering we practice around here doesn't remove power from the people. We can debate Citizens United. We can debate the existence of blatantly partisan media, and the monoculture of media owners. We can debate a regime that has clearly abandoned ethical delineations, and that values loyalty over competence. All of these, individually, chip away at democracy. The question is if together they've chipped away enough that we aren't one any more. (My current assessment is that we still have a small window to turn this around, but it's closing. It's open wider than in Hungary, it's less wide open than in Germany or France)

AxiomCloNe 6y ago

Noam Chomsky's been saying the US isn't a democracy since the 70's? Post ww2? I'm early in my introduction to him so it's fuzzy. Statistically, the laws passed and the actions the government takes are primarily influenced by corporations, thus making it a plutocracy.

Geezus_42 6y ago

The U. S. has never been a true democracy. It was founded as a democratic republic.