Because the Liberal Party is a party of the centre, with right-of-centre and left-of-centre supporters. Mackenzie King in particular saw the threat from the CCF (the predecessor to the NDP) on his left flank after WWII, and he and his successor, St Laurent, brought in legislation that borrowed from the CCF platform on social issues. That centrist coalition in the Liberal Party has, until recently, been enough to keep them ahead of the CCF/NDP.
One big example is Medicare: it was implemented at the national level by Prime Minister Pearson.
This is an extremely tiresome right-wing shibboleth that you should be ashamed to repeat.
Go out and get 10 dictionaries printed within the last 100 years. Paper dictionaries, not these left-wing online dictionaries. Copy down the definition of “democracy” listed in each one. Report back.
How many of those dictionaries do you suppose will say, as the first definition, something along the lines of “Democracy is when simple majority vote makes all decisions”?
I’ll tell you how many. Zero.
Dictionaries don’t prescribe usage, they describe usage. No person in the last hundred years, outside a minuscule minority of right-wing cranks, has used the word “democracy” to mean unlimited majoritarian direct democracy. 99.9% of Americans don’t use the word “democracy” to mean what you insist it should mean, and have not used it this way since the days of the founding of our country.
This is like arguing that Earth isn’t a planet, since “planet” only refers to wandering stars, and the ancient Greeks who coined the word didn’t think of the Earth as a planet, the only objects in the entire universe that should be classified as planets are the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, since that’s what the word originally meant.
Again, right-wing shibboleth, only espoused by cranks who insist that their idiolect is the only proper way to speak. Words mean things, that doesn’t mean that right-wing cranks decide what those words mean. There’s glory for you!
It’s possible for a nation to abolish slavery without being a democracy, but it’s not possible for a nation to be a democracy while allowing slavery, unless you’re using some bizarre notion of slavery which allows the slaves to vote.
Which the US is not. The leaders of the US are elected by the Electoral College and once elected they are expected to ignore the will of the people in the interest of logic, reason, and integrity. The slaves weren’t emancipated because the people willed it, they were emancipated because a bunch of cantankerous, over-educated white guys got together and decided that slavery was immoral.
Except that unions finance the most lobbyists and contribute the most to campaigns.
After all, most businesses need to keep their bottom line down, which can’t happen if they’re spending a bunch on playing politics, and they need to stay popular with their customers, which can’t happen if they’re overly blatant about buying off politicians so that they can sell three-eyed mutant fish at the supermarket. Further, most businesses have no interest in playing politics, so there’s not many involved in it.
Whereas unions have as much money to spend as they can convince workers that it is in their benefit to give them, everything they do will be popular with the great public, and they have nothing else to do in the world except tackle politics and upper management all day.
More importantly, the purpose of all of this is to allow groups who have legitimate beefs have a known, watched, and regulated method by which they can make their arguments. The goal of the government is not to follow the public will, it’s to do proper investigation, listen to all sides, and make as wise and just a decision as possible. Unless you have a better recommendation than the systems we currently have in place, to allow that to happen, you’re not accomplishing much by complaining about it.
And speaking for myself, democracy is a descriptor, a quality which exists in varying degrees. It’s not something that switches on or off - it’s something which waxes and wanes. To say America is ‘not a democracy’ is as fallacious as saying a cup of tea doesn’t contain water.
“Miscellaneous Business” is at the top of the list, spending $412,733,580 in 2014. That category is followed by five other business sectors which each spent more than a hundred million a year. The list of hundred million spenders is rounded out by “Other” and “Ideology/Single-Issue”.
Labour doesn’t come into the picture until 12th place, spending $33,575,341.
So the total of clearly business lobbying on this list, excluding “Other” and “Ideology/Single Issue” is about $2 billion, compared to $33.5 million for labour.
However, it still remains that spending is reasonably even across the parties, fluctuating back and forth over time. If the idea is that lobbying gives Republicans and Big Business an advantage, that simply isn’t the case. Republicans are getting about half. Democrats are getting about half.
And in terms of lobbying being all about “Big Business”, Labor (unions), Lawyers, Health, and Ideology, are about half of spending even in 2014, and in the clear majority back in 2008, so assuming that those are the two ends of the pendulum, the average favors non-business. In 2014 the top spending smaller-level industry was apparently “Environment”. Of course, some of the industry spending, Transportation, Energy, etc. are probably split fairly heavily on which side of the political aisle the relevant parties come down on. Oil companies are in there, for sure, but so is solar power.
Yes, it is certainly true that America is a democratic republic. It is also a republican democracy, and all sorts of adjectives could be accurately used to describe it.
What makes a country a republic is that it is not a monarchy. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a republic, despite being a dictatorship.
The modern definition of “democracy” is the definition that everyone uses, just like the modern definition of “planet” is the definition that everyone uses, just like “you” is not formal in modern speech. You can insist that everyone else in the world is using the words wrong but that doesn’t mean the other 500 million english speakers on planet earth have to adopt your usage.
People want it to mean what they want it to mean. Hence the bickering in this thread about whether America is a “democracy” or not. The country was founded to intentionally not be a true democracy, in the sense the word was used back then.
As an illustration, Iran can be considered a democracy as well. So how useful is the term at all anyway?
“Hence it is that democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths… A republic, by which I mean a government in which a scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking.” --James Madison
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”
–Ben Franklin
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
–Thomas Jefferson
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
–John Adams
Well it’s a word that has “evolved” to mean anything anybody wants. Iran can call itself a democracy just as we can, and others can say we’re not democratic at all.
It’s all a giant waste of time. This country was founded to explicitly avoid majority rule, a historically central tenet of democracy.
But we are “democratic,” by modern standards. So we can all sip our latte’s and feel good about that.
IRL, of course, as Franklin was wise enough to know, democracy is two sheep and a wolf voting on what to have for lunch, because IRL the sheep outnumber the wolves and democracy (not arms) is the only defense they’ve got.
