The US is not a democracy.

Great Debates
1

I don’t know how many times I have seen this, whenever the US is being criticized in one way or another, there is always someone who brings up the so called fact that the US is a democracy. This is wrong. The US isn’t now nor has it ever been a democracy, it is a republic. (Elected representation). A democracy implies that each individual member of said nation has a say in deciding each and every issue. Now I am not sure, but I don’t think the US has ever had a plebiscite on a federal level. (Please correct me if I’m wrong).

The only nation even remotely close to being democratic is Switzerland where the people vote on every major issue, although not all issues. (This is why Switzerland is not a member of the EU or the UN, the Swiss people voted against joining).

Of all the true republics in the world, the US seems to me to be the least representative of the people. Apart from an occasional independent politician, there are only two parties to choose from and these parties are funded by big money funneled in by corporations and wealthy individuals. Now don’t get me wrong, I am a capitalist and a businessman, but capitalism is not a political system, it is an economic system (some would say a theory).
Yet the US political system is purely driven by money. The party elected tends to be the one that spent their campaign dollars most wisely through advertising and marketing. Each election I’m dismayed at the poor choice of candidates and they’re getting worse and worse each time. I don’t know how many times I have heard someone say in one form or another that they are voting the better of two evils for lack of anything better.
The elected vote on issues based on money and how it’s going to benefit their contributors. US foreign policy is driven by capital, even to such an extent as to ignore international treaties, which the rest of the world is ready to ratify. (Example: Kyoto Treaty).
Most domestic and foreign policy is based on capital and tends to benefit the companies and individuals who contributed to the election campaigns. We have already established that the US is not a democracy, and should be more accurately defined as a republic. Yet, the way the US political system is now, I am starting to wonder if it could truly be considered even a republic. Perhaps it is better described as a “conglomeracy” to coin a word to mean a nation ruled by corporations. Or perhaps USA Inc. (If you can coin a better word, please feel free to do so).

So, as an American, do you truly feel you are being fairly well represented in your government? Couldn’t there be a better system to make the US into a real democracy where each individual has the right to vote on all important issues? We certainly have the technical know how to make such a system work. Isn’t it time for a change?

Jack

2

‘Democracy’ is a very vague term. Most western democratic states are actually representative democracies; I don’t believe that direct democracy is feasible (or desirable, but that’s a whole other debate) in modern states. While there are undeniably weaknesses to be corrected in representative democracies, I don’t see how that entirely invalidates it as a political system.

Regarding the Swiss and EU membership, many other European states have also held referenda on membership (Norway and Denmark spring to mind).

3

democracy – “Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.”

The U.S. is not a direct democracy, but it is both a representative democracy (or democratic republic) and a liberal democracy. Since I wholeheartedly support the principles of liberal democray, I don’t necessarily support all efforts to make the U.S. more “directly” democratic, although this is not to say that I oppose every proposal for electoral or campaign finance reform, either.

Republic has been used in so many senses that democracy is arguably more descriptive of modern liberal republics, not to mention that many liberal states are constitutional monarchies and are thus excluded from being republics.

Oh, and Switzerland’s Federal Constitution was partly modeled on the Constitution of the United States, and mirrors some of its non-(direct)-democratic features, such as a bicameral legislature with one house elected by state (or canton) rather than by population. There is a system of plebiscites and referenda, which I suppose makes Switzerland more directly democratic than the U.S. as a whole (but not necessarily more directly democratic than, say, California); then again, these guys only got around to enfranchising half their population in 1971, which doesn’t seem very democratic to me.

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First of all, this is the umpteenth time someone on these boards has asserted that the U.S. is not a democracy. It’s a ludicrous argument - meanings of words change, and if the majority of English-speakers in this country understand “democracy” to include the U.S. system of government, than a “democracy” is what the U.S. system of government is. If, later, a majority decides the U.S. system of government is a “Whattsit”, that it will then be a “Whattsit”.

Say whaa?

  1. Money politics infects all of the liberal democracies. The impact of corporations and wealthy individuals in the U.S. is on orders of magnitude less than in Japan, for example.
    And perhaps you’ve heard of the tangentopoli scandal in Italy, Kohl’s secret funds in Germany, or the ongoing “cash-for-tickets” scandal with Chirac in France?

  2. Putting aside money, I would submit that a PR, parliamentary system is less representative of the people. Sure, you get more choices of parties, but the MPs are beholden to the party leadership to keep their jobs, not the people - they aren’t voted on directly.
    Even in countries with voting-district based Parliaments, you get result that by the U.S. standard is representative. In the recent election in England, for example, Labour got 41% of the vote, yet holds an overwhelming majority in Parliament.

Sua

5

True, but the threads are getting shorter and better.

6

Not really. But since I am the government, I have only myself to blame.

Why on earth do you think that’s a good idea?? Mob rule? Thanks, I’ll pass–I know too many of my fellow citizens.

Of course, I like the US Constitution, I like representative government, and I oppose voter iniatives. So what do I know?

7

Sua, In response to NiceGuyJack’s suggestion that the US seems to him to be the least representative of democracies in the world you wrote,

*"Say whaa?

  1. Money politics infects all of the liberal democracies."*

That may be broadly true, but the US is worse affected for a number of reasons. For one thing, fewer people (less than half of those eligible) actually bother to vote than in any other liberal democracy. For example, in Germany’s last big election, if I recall rightly, the figure was over 80%. Unlike some European countries, the US has a “winner-takes-all” system. A more democratic alternative is a “proportional representation” system so that if, for example, if a third party earns a percentage of the vote, the also get a percentage of the representation.

For some information on proportional representation, instant runoff voting (which also encourages third-party voting) and other info, check out this link to the website for the Center for Voting and Democracy.

Sua again:“The impact of corporations and wealthy individuals in the U.S. is on orders of magnitude less than in Japan, for example.”

That is true, but Japan has a very different corporate culture wherein corporate leaders feel directly responsible to their employees and the society at large. In a chapter on Japan in One World, Ready or Not (an awesome book about globalization), William Greider recounts a situation where Japanese top management (who earn less than their US counterparts) considered taking a substantial paycut in lieu of laying off workers. For Japanese management, the laying off of workers is extremely distasteful; it represents a failure on their part. To American eyes, Japanese culture is bound to look more feudal and I’m not suggesting that kind of culture would or should work in the US. What I am suggesting is that we can’t simply compare ourselves to the Japanese and assume that we are better off in this respect.

Another big US problem is that at the end of the nineteenth century, an era of growing corporate power, corporations were granted the status of “persons” in the eyes of the law, thus giving them the rights and privileges
of human individuals. This is a complicated issue and I’m not sure if there has ever been a “Great Debate” on the subject.

NiceGuy, I think you’re clouding your own point by worrying about the verbal distinction between “democracy” and “republic.” The key point is that you don’t have to have a republic to have a (representative) democracy. Britain, for example, is a constitutional monarchy, not a republic, b/c their queen is a symbolic sovereign. But in practical terms she has no impact on the quality of the representative institutions.

Speaking of awesome books by William Greider, there’s another one precisely on the subject of failing: Who Will Tell the People Now?. In some ways the fact that the book is nine years old, written during the first Bush presidency, makes it even more interesting–though the anti-democratic trends it documents have only gotten worse since that time. And another book that I’ve sometimes mentioned in past posts is Robert McChesney’s Rich Media, Poor Democracy. McChesney as a good website too:

8

Ooops… I meant say that Greider’s book is preciseonly on the subject of failing democracy.

9

NGJ: The US isn’t now nor has it ever been a democracy, it is a republic.

As other respondents have pointed out, this is simply splitting hairs about semantics, and is pretty much an obsolete distinction as well. If the U.S. is not a democracy, then what was it doing at the Quebec City Third Summit of the Americas this spring, involving “the 34 Western Hemisphere democracies”? What is it doing as a member of the international Community of Democracies? What is it doing in NATO, all of whose members are required to be “functioning democracies”?

In short, Jack, you have two choices: you can continue to complain that everybody else is using the term “democracy” wrong in all these and many other contexts, or you can buy yourself a clue and start using the term the way pretty much every other commentator on national or international politics uses it. (Either way, though, you’re welcome to go on making good points about undue corporate influence in U.S. politics, although I doubt that your recommended solution—dismantling representative democracy in favor of some form of direct democracy—would really be an improvement.)

10

Kimstu, Thanks for posting these interesting links. Sorry if this puts you on the spot–feel free to pass over it. But I’m wondering if you think that the US is in fact a “functioning democracy.”

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Mandelstam: But I’m wondering if you think that the US is in fact a “functioning democracy.”

Hmmm. Yeah, according to the criteria that seem to be generally used—free elections, free press, freedom of opinion, and so forth—we definitely qualify. I agree, though, that a lot of these areas of functionality are being undermined by the influence of money and the excessive clout of the two major parties. Recent findings about infringements of voting rights in national elections are worrisome, as is the increasing dependence on corporate campaign contributions and the growth of the media giants. We are still a functioning democracy, I think, but we are probably closest of all the First World nations to tipping over into a plutocracy, effectively total or near-total control by the influence of wealth.

Hey, here’s a question, if Jack doesn’t mind our redirecting his debate a little bit:

If you agree that the effective (meaning what actually operates, rather than just what’s on paper) system of government in the US is being shifted from representative democracy to plutocracy, at what point do you think the crucial change has occurred/will occur? Are we a plutocracy now, and if not, what development(s) will push us over the edge? And what are the most important things you think we should institute to counteract that?

Personally, I think we’re moving toward plutocracy but not there yet (in fact, I don’t think we’re even as close as we had been near the beginning of this century). It would take quite a bit to turn us into an actual functioning plutocracy, IMHO:

  • even more media consolidation/monopoly and stricter, more explicit corporate censorship (at present, there are still several influential independent news organs and journalists publishing “censorable” stories);

  • term limits for national legislative offices, so representatives would have even less incentive than they do now to be accountable to the electorate rather than to their wealthy campaign creditors;

  • voter turnout in national elections consistently under 20% of the eligible population;

  • further weakening of the NLRB and decline of union membership to under 5% of the workforce, with laissez-faire employment policies and rollback of workplace rights;

  • mandatory burdensome review policies (and substantial defunding) for all activities of watchdog institutions like the EPA and OSHA and NRC, making it nearly impossible for them to regulate effectively;

  • rollback of all “Clean Election” laws at the state level so that public monies couldn’t be used for election to national office, making all candidates even more dependent on private and corporate wealth;

  • further tax cuts especially in the upper brackets, and reduction of non-defense discretionary spending across the board to less than a quarter of its current level in real money;

  • massive defunding of public schools and universities, or alternatively (and more probably), massive transfer of their funding to the private sector via corporate sponsorship, donor-provided textbooks, and grant money, which would reduce the possibility of learning anything not heavily influenced by private interests.

There are a lot more things that would be involved, of course, but I think that those developments would be enough to substantially ensure that policy at the national level would be almost exclusively responsive to the interests of the wealthy. Everybody else would be unable to exert any real influence in the public sphere, and would be so much under the thumb of plutocrats in the private sphere that they’d have no separate influence to speak of.

Man, actually considering this as a possibility is really rather depressing and scary, especially when it occurs to me that we’re not in fact all that far away from this scenario. The most important countermeasures, IMHO, are “clean election” laws at the state level that provide public money for candidacies, campaign finance reform at the national level, proportional representation, more independent media voices (especially in more open media like the internet), and increased unionization and defense of workers’ rights. What do you think?

12

Myself, I think some measures of direct democracy would be a good thing.

For example, the final say on a new amendment could be publicly voted on, even though Congress may initiate it. I think that is a pretty reasonable behavior.

Is this a hijack? Ah, well. The US is a democracy. It could be more democratic, to be sure, but as you can see most Dopers don’t feel that is a step in the right direction.

13
  1. What does the percentage of U.S. voters who bother to vote have to do with money politics? Are you asserting that the money donated by the corporations and wealthy individuals to the parties, which is what the OP was talking about, is used to discourage Americans from voting?
  2. As I wrote in my earlier post, PR has its own problems, the most significant of which is that individual members of parliaments have no bloc of voters to which they answer. Their continued careers depend on where on the candidate list for their party they are placed. As such, they are beholden to their party’s leadership, not the voters.
  3. As I also pointed out in my last post, the English parliamentary system allows for such undemocratic results as a party receiving 41% of the vote having an unassailable majority in Parliament.
    I’m not saying the U.S. system is better, I’m just pointing out that all systems that attempt to represent the population in a manageable way will necessarily have undemocratic elements.

:Sigh: Once again, I was responding to the OP - the assertion that the U.S. system is the “least representative” due to the influence of donations by corporations and wealthy individuals.

And anyone who has followed Japanese politics and economics over the last decades would acknowledge that the influence of Japanese big business over Japanese politics is immense, much more so than in the U.S.
As for whether the influence of Japanese corporations on politics is undemocratic, hell, the Japanese economy has been in almost permanent recession for the past ten years in large part because Japanese politicians won’t buck their corporate paymasters and introduce urgently needed reforms - reforms that would have the effect of forcing many of those corporations out of business. The result is that the people of Japan continue to suffer from recession and deflation, not to mention the largest government debt in the world, caused by repeated “stimulus packages”, which simply hand over tax money to prevent the failure of these near-death corporations, particularly in the construction industry. Not exactly “the greatest good for the greatest number”.

BTW, the Japanese culture of lifetime employment has been dead for at least seven years. Whether the Japanese corporate culture is “better” or “worse” than the U.S. one is an interesting topic, but it is not the one I was writing about.

As an attorney whose entire current practice consists of representing foreign corporations, I can tell you that every developed nations’ legal systems I have deat with consider corporations to be “persons”. Further, my recollection is that this concept developed in England, not the U.S., and well before the end of the 19th Century.

Sua

14

:rolleyes:

Let’s try “many of those who have posted in this thread don’t feel that way.” I don’t know that I would categorize 7 or 8 people as “most Dopers.”

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Oh, and the text of Article 5 of the Constitution of the Unites States, for anyone who’s interested:

16

Gee, that’s only the impression I got from the **previous ** threads on this topic.

However, “most dopers” is probably a useless phrase. So many never leave the Pit or MPSIMS so I guess they can’t be categorized.

I move to strike the rolleyes from the record.

17

Dear NiceGuyJack

When I saw your OP, I knew you were in deep shit. The Dopers don’t like the word Republic for whatever reason. Note that in all the posts not one said that Republic even remotely referred to our type of government. Being a Poltical Science Major I remember my professor saying that ours was a republic form of government (but what the hell did he know?).
Before anyone jumps me, I agree on the other types of democracy being acceptable, but just saying that Republic isn’t wrong either.

18

Whoa, Hoss. The fact that I stated that the U.S. is a “democracy”, within the common usage of the term says nothing about whether I think the current U.S. system can or should be improved/changed.

Sua

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kniz: Note that in all the posts not one said that Republic even remotely referred to our type of government.

Wrong; you must have missed MEBuckner’s comment about the US being legitimately termed a “democratic republic” as well as a “representative democracy”.

just saying that Republic isn’t wrong either.

Nobody claimed it was, and your suggestion that we just “don’t like the word Republic” is completely unfounded. What we don’t like are inaccurate assertions, such as the one in the title and OP of this thread.

20

I haven’t seen many issues where I have been misrepresented by our elected officials. I work for corporations so anything that benefits the corporation benefits me.

If the US decides against some environmental legislation, that may piss off some people. But if passing that legislation creates hardships for corporations and they have to lay off some of their workers, that isn’t good either.

I know people like to poke fun at Bush and even I think his methods are a little heavy handed sometimes. But could someone give me some examples of issues that Bush has handled in a way that misrepresents the American people?