The funny thing is that by assuming “whites” are a monolithic block, he undermines his own argument. Since they are the majority, then their views should rule the day in a democracy. So I guess whites are the ones who actually do understand what democracy is about!
I don’t think it’s a two way street like you’re saying. The population of the United States is 72% white and 12% black. It’s possible for a white American to go through their daily routine without ever having to interact with or think about black people. It’s not possible for a black American to go through their daily routine without having to interact with or think about white people. Black American are forced to have empathy in a way that white Americans are not.
This is a regional thing.
I live in Alabama. Granted there are some parts of North Alabama that are 90% white and parts of the Black Belt that are 90% black; but for the most part, in this part of the country cross-racial interaction is unavoidable.
asahi has made it quite clear that he hasn’t got the faintest idea what anybody should do, but if it doesn’t get you arrested and/or shot, then it’s ineffective.
But it is still a very true statement, especially in rural mid-America. My nephews go to school in North Dakota. It isn’t exactly a bastion of diversity.
And, true story although not the case any longer. There were ZERO minorities in my high school. I graduated from high school in the mid-1980s in the suburban Twin Cities with kids who had never SEEN a non-white person in real life.
(Thirty years later my son spent a year in that district. He’s Asian. We went to his band concert. He stuck out - it was so white he said “glare get you?” In thirty years they’d gotten a few minority kids - but none in band).
But you don’t even have that. Within the last two decades, of the 2 out of the 3 who won the presidency, they were all white, and didn’t win the popular vote. That’s not a democracy, that’s white supremacy. You can’t have a fully functioning democracy when the State is engaging in voter suppression. You cannot have a fully functioning democracy without a free press that reports the facts. You cannot have a fully functioning democracy when either side dehumanizes the other. The US may be many things but a democracy it is not. Stacey Abrams and disenfranchised people of color in Georgia can attest to that. The gerrymandered districts that in Louisiana, Florida, and Texas can attest to that.
The Presidential election process makes no claim to be purely Democratic. Why is it necessarily “white supremacy”? What does voter suppression have to do with the electoral college system?
That’s correct. Are you suggesting that every proposed law should be decided by a nationwide popular vote?
Don’t forget North Carolina.
That’s easy, because it means that you only have to suppress votes in a few states in order to turn an election, rather than across the whole country.
It is also not a representative democracy if the representatives do not represent the will of the voters.
Hopefully we can all agree that the United States government, for better or for worse, was intentionally set up NOT as a pure Democracy, but as a representative government with democratic elements.
Why is “Democracy”, without any qualifiers, being held up as the unquestioned ideal?
I’m a white guy and I can’t blame the OP.
Look at how whites have treated blacks, especially in the south. Blacks in the south lived in a de facto dictatorship in the south until the 1960s. They had no civil rights.
This idea that we’re supposed to poo-poo the OP and say ‘no, white people are amazing’, when they happily created dictatorships for non-whites up until a few decades ago in over a dozen states is bullshit. And whites didn’t give up those dictatorships happily, they were forced to give them up by judges and the military.
There is something wrong with white culture when it comes to how many of us treat those who are different than us. Why is it so bad to admit to that? We are very willing to dehumanize the other and take their rights away.
Is this a trait all humans share? Yes, but we are in the US, and these are our particular problems we need to deal with.
Obviously not all white people are bad. Whites outside the south voted for civil rights in the south under LBJ. Whites volunteered to help register voters.
But there is a very loud, vocal % of white people who are very very hostile to democracy for anyone who is different from them. We need to be honest about this fact and deal with it like adults rather than start complaining when anyone admits to this fact.
But all Southern whites are bad, amiright?
Because you are reading too much into it.
Democracy as a generic ideal is when the governed choose their form of governing. What exact type of system is variable. You can question that, if you like, but I kinda like it.
But the idea that the people have a voice in their government is democracy, even if democracy as a form of government is a specific form where everyone has a vote on everything.
For instance, the definition of democracy is
So the very definition of democracy has the idea of representative democracy built into it. Your demand that people qualify the term is without merit.
All you are doing here by playing semantic games and incorrectly trying to correct other’s terminology is to distract from the fact that we also do not have a representative democracy, in that the make up of our government does not reflect the will of the governed. If you want to have a discussion, defend that, don’t try to be distracting with your failed attempts at pendacism.
He did say “white Americans” as you can see above. It may not have been part of the OP but it shows that it is what he meant in the OP.
All? No. The majority, yes.
Because if the majority didn’t support Jim Crow, it wouldn’t have happened.
So yes, the majority of whites in the south supported creating a brutal dictatorship for those who are different from them.
Thank you for clarifying, and I agree with you that our government does not reflect the will of the governed. Our ironclad two-party system is proof enough of that.
Who took it from Winston Churchill.
I’m not sure I agree with that, but I’m willing to be proven wrong.
The South has a legacy of being run by a small minority (the wealthy, landed class), kind of a neo-feudal system, in which the vast majority of the population, both white and black, had virtually no education and no power.
There’s a pretty big gap between ‘white people are amazing’ and ‘white people are all stupid’. And the OP is basically “White Americans are all stupid! Wake up, sheeple!!!” I don’t have to think that whites are somehow better than anyone else to be insulted by Chicken Little’s latest squawkings. Much less when he has no idea what he’s talking about according to his own logic.
Leaving aside the matter of the different states having representation in Congress and in the Electoral College (ETA: that is disproportionate to population):
Why shouldn’t “Democracy” without any qualifiers be the unquestioned ideal within each state?
The Founders didn’t let everybody vote (which we’ve changed, at least with respect to adults), but nothing in the Constitution suggests that, within a state, some of our votes should count more or less than the votes of others.
If there’s a particular theory of representation that you’re espousing that makes a case that different voters should be given different weight, let’s hear it. Otherwise, within each state, each person’s vote counting equally is the obvious default, and what even a kindergartener would regard as ‘fair.’