What is your line in the sand?
Edit: thank you all for your responses. I think it’s important as an American we take your view points seriously. I think of a North Korean living inside of North Korea. They don’t really know how bad it is because that is all hidden from them and they’ve never had anything else. As things get worse for Americans it’s important to have your voices because we will become more and more isolated.
Even the guy who said, “lol.” Some people need that sort of sobering reaction.
Would be nice to know what part of America you mean by that. It is a pretty big continent you know? Argentinians, Mexicans, Brasilians and so on are all part of America.
Buuuut I’m gonna go ahead and assume you are asking about the UNITED STATES country, right?
Yes it is a Democracy. Not perfect, but then again which one is?
On paper, I guess so? In reality, and as is the case with pretty much every developed democracy, money and technology make a mockery of the whole idea. A society in which billionaires can buy their way into the Whitehouse - literally - is no democracy.
No and it hasn’t been for a long time. As long as you can buy influence via lobbying then then playing field is not level.
The difference this time is they are not trying to hide it anymore
Canadian here.
Before Trump? Ehhh, not really. I’ve always viewed the US as a place where you vote for which oligarch-backed monarch you’d want to put in absolute power for 4 years. Every 4/8 years the new incoming overlord just rips up whatever the previous one did and nothing of substance is actually achieved.
After Trump 2.0? No. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Trump is going to surrender all that power he and the GOP have accumulated. And why would he? He doesn’t have to. He literally controls every branch of government that he can and ignores those that he doesn’t. If the US ever has another election it will purely be for show, like China’s elections. The mask is now fully off and the charade of US democracy is over as those who actually wield the power now do so openly on their sleeves.
China’s democracy is among party members.
Oh I love parties! I’ll bring the glowsticks!
lol
Anyone who is eligible to vote, and chooses not to, implicitly throws their support behind whoever wins.
On 2024-11-05, ⅔ of US citizens who were eligible to vote told the rest of the world they don’t want to be taken seriously for at least 2 years.
The US had always been a questionable democracy with the hyperfixation on the president and just two parties setting the agenda, but I’d argue that it’s still a democracy, though it is a rapidly deteriorating one.
For the time being, sure. I dint think democracy is a binary. Democracy doesn’t imply a fair system or universal suffrage or a system where power is split.
Like for example the Vatican is a absolute monarchy and also a democracy.
still consider
It has only two political parties, and a weird system where all votes are not equal and the actual vote majority doesn’t always win.
It has frequently had multiple people from the same families running for office, and only wealthy people have a shot. Corporations get to lobby for laws in their favour.
It also spies on its own citizens, holds people indefinitely without trial, has a huge prison population, a militarized police with a high homicide rate, and is the only western nation with the death penalty.
Trump and Musk are laying bare how fragile the veneer of “democracy” really is in that country.
Absolutely not. A two party system was barely nominally a form of democracy. Current one quacks like a dictatorship and walks like a dictatorship. They might hold a fake election one day like many of those do, but still no.
Firstly, the USA is obviously not a “dictatorship”. Come on, be serious. Words mean things.
Second, America’s two-party system also has internal factions and primaries, many of them completely open (you don’t even need to declare allegiance to the party). The primaries are effectively the first round in a two-round electoral system (of which there are plenty in the world). The whole point is to create a binary choice in the final round. For some reason this always gets missed by otherwise informed observers. “There are only two parties” is just not a valid argument in this debate.
Of course, none of these facts will be popular here, since the real point of this thread is to allow participants to performatively dump on the shared hate-object. Classic social media, I get it.
Firstly, the USA is obviously not a “dictatorship”.
You sure about that? Have you read the news lately?
Yeah I have and saying that kinda just makes you seem uninformed.
Like the people who call the US “a 3rd world country in a Gucci belt”. It just makes it super obvious that you don’t understand how high quality of a life the average person has in the US. Especially globally.
I’m not going to list all the red flags, but there is a reason people feel like this. A few major ones, president talking about taking over other countries out of the blue, attacking our allies to the point where Americans are suffering much more than necessary, his sidekick doing Nazi salutes on stage, literal commercials for his $idekick on the white house lawn.
It’s pretty clear there is no rule of law for blatant corruption and no accountability. Replace USA/Trump with Russia/Putin or NK/Un, guess what, same shit, different smell. Either follow orders or get shipped out is the example they’re trying to set, as well as making free speech illegal.
We’re FAR from a functioning democracy.
In practice, however, it is a two-party system.
I consider it a lesser democracy / something that barely qualifies for a few years now.
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First off, I’m an American. Born a stone’s throw from the location of one of the critical events in the history of the American revolution.
To answer the question, no. Leaving aside the whole Republic versus democracy argument, my point of realization was when one party seized upon a minor technical issue and disenfranchised countless voters via lawsuit, sufficient to allow the race to be called in their favor.
I’m sure there are many readers who believe I’m talking about 2016. For those readers, your keyword search is “hanging Chad”.
Another key search from the same events is “Brooks Brothers Riot”.
Am Dutch. I have considered the US an incomplete democracy since I learned about voting in school. It’s not one person one vote, which to me is crucial for a democracy. The US right now is still a nation of laws, but democracy is sharply in decline. The voter-roll issues and Gerrymandering come to mind immediately. Not to mention the fact that guaranteed access to polls has been pulled by the courts. Which is insane to me.
$ is votes, who could have seen where that would go.
Also president having so much power was clearly never democratic to begin with as we can see it all play out now.
The power of the president did not start out like this. Congress kept giving their power to the executive for political reasons.
It happened over centuries.
No. And I haven’t for a while now. Looking at your electoral system (electoral college, gerrymandering etc.), it probably never was but it was never as obvious as it is now.
This
I grew up in the US and have lived outside it for 10 years now. I would agree with this. Voting and representation have never been total and is definitely less available for many groups. Further things are being stripped away.
Yeah. My wake-up call was quite early in life, when SCOTUS handed the election to GWB. If I was born a generation earlier I’d have called it with Watergate. If I was an ancestor currently dead, I would have called it around the time an assassin put the presidency in the hands of the opposite party, and a drunk asshole subsequently decided reconstruction efforts should fail. Or possibly just prior, when we somehow decided not to hang every man Jack of the confederacy for treason.
Edit: an earlier still version of me would have overseen the death of a culture brought on by poxy mad white religious extremists, and laughed ruefully to hear that centuries later the utter bastardy continues unchanged.
