Is the United States a Democracy? Or Not?

There is something fundamentally weak with the way the USA picks its president.

Good advice, however Americans wont listen, they need protests to shake them up. I talk to Rightists all the time and they make it clear they want voting made harder, not easier; they want heavy emphasis on republican, light on democracy. America is a “republican-democracy”, saddled with a Constitution from the year the French Revolution began—old hat. The larger problem is something you don’t have to glimpse from afar, you can see from merely reading Rightist comments here at a technoprog site.. remote causation-based thinking: fifty years ago it was retaining prayer in public schools—of marginal benefit;
two decades ago it was banning flag burning (that is, American flag burning- they don’t care if foreign flags are torched);
today it’s preventing gays from marrying. Chicken-scratch issues, piddling little obsessions in a would of nuclear proliferation, diminishing H2O, and so on and so forth. Of the three issues listed above, only flag burning is of slight interest—but only because of the effect of the smoke on the atmosphere! Shows you how petty the issues are. Gay marriage isn’t all that important, yet it is current and some questions are:
would it matter to rubes if gays and adulterers migrated into outer space, or is ‘sin’ considered sin anywhere in the cosmos?
is sex with “gay” ‘bots sin as well? Sounds facetious because the issues are de facto facetious.
To deal with fear involved (loss of familial prestige) then rubes have to discuss issues out in the open and not hide in their political closets. One of the deepest issues is the one they wish to ‘fess up to the least: everyone thinks they deserve what they get, others they think are less deserving or not deserving at all. Billionaires think they deserve what they get from the state because they put more into the system but the homeless can sleep in the woods for all billionaires care. All is not vanity- all is status.

Considering the original meaning of democracy (rule by the “demos” which included only people of means and education) the US certainly qualifies.  Those of us hanging on to hopes and illusions about “true” democracy (rule by “the people” - yikes) or rule by reason for everyone’s benefit, would probably wise to drop the term altogether, as it wasn’t conceived to denote what we may have in mind, nor ever realized in that sense anywhere.  Tinkering with the electoral system is useless.  There are many variations of it out there in various countries and none of them achieve the purpose.  The two options I see are to make it illegal to spread lies about the political and economic conditions and machinations (the main effect of which would be another field day for the lawyers), or to delegate the decision making process to AI andor the most advanced enhanced “humans” or a combination thereof.

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