Definitely not. Just because not everything always works in democracy doesn’t mean that a government that has control over our private lives and infringes on our individual liberties is somehow better. No system of government is perfect, because humans are fallible. And imagine that you did find that “good” benevolent dictator. How would you know who to replace him/her with after he/she died? I honestly don’t think democracies work that badly; I am not as cynical about politics as some people are. Again, people are fallible. Naturally politicians haggle over different issues and some of them are corrupt and may want to advance their own interests over those of the public good, but IMO at the end of the day, having a seat in a legislative body is a job like any other.
To quote something that Winston Churchill said in the House of Commons in 1947: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”
I agree on all those points. The US system was not and is not purely democratic, by design. It’s more democratic than it was. I think there’s room for differing opinions whether it’s now democratic enough, or too democratic.
Modern technology makes it more technically feasible to have absolute democracy now. It’s technically feasible arguably to subject legislation to instant polls by all citizens via the web (still has technical issues, verifying identity, hacking and such, but 100 yrs ago or even much more recently, basically impossible). But I think most people would still see this as a terrible idea (again even assuming hacking/false vote problem were 100% solved). I sure would. The idea of electing one’s ‘betters’ to make decisions, as unpopular as that has been to actually say any time in the last many decades at least, still has some validity IMO.
Also features like Electoral College, not to go down that rabbit hole too much, are actually a mixture of old ideas about representatives v the people (pretty much totally obsolete, now a remarkable event for electors not to vote for who they said they would) and how to define ‘the people’, IOW whether states have any meaning besides being arbitrary boundaries and different color license plates. People who assume the EC shouldn’t exist assume an answer to the second question that’s not obvious to everyone. And it’s conceivable the advantage given by EC in popular vote terms could eventually shift back to being in favor of Democrats, in which case IMO 90% of the really partisan people would switch sides on the issue.
Anyway under the constitutional republic system you can change things like that if enough people agree with you. Saying that’s ‘not democracy’ is in the limit saying 50%+1 (valid, non hacked) votes on the internet should decide every question, including defining human rights, etc. Who actually believes that’s a good idea? So if every sane person agrees there’s a limit to democracy, it should be viewed as a practical discussion and disagreement about stuff like the EC, not ‘I’m for democracy, you’re for dictatorship!’ histrionics.
This. The question is fundamentally incoherent. The expanded version of the question in the OP does not add useful information, because it posits not a temporary change but a permanent one, apparently to address one problem.
The poll questio is incoherent in a similar way the question “can an irresistible force move an immovable object” is incoherent - one of the fundamental premises of the question (either immoveability or irresistiblenEss) must be wrong.
Here, it is not in contest that democracy is imperfect, it is just, as the saying goes, better than all the others. To give a meaningful answer to the proposed dilemma, it is necessary to know what system is proposed to replace it. You can in principle answer a question in the.form “Is A better than B?” You can’t answer in principle a question in the form “Is A better than something else?”, because there is no comparitor to test A against. Nor can the question be transformed into “Is A better than everything else?”, because there is no finite list of the alternatives to democracy.
Since the first premise of the question is "Would you abolish democracy…?, then I could only answer no.