How imperfect is American democracy? Someone asked me on Quora so I thought I’d share the answer here.
I’m not aware of a scale. It’s very, very far from good.
America isn’t even close to being a decent democracy
Read Ozgur Zeren’s answer and watch the video he recommends. In that video, Noam Chomsky says America is, and was designed to be, a polyarchy. That’s a government by a small number of people. In this case, men of the “responsible class”. Those who were educated, which at that time was almost synonymous with wealthy.
We had a chance of a real democracy before the civil war while corporations were prohibited. But after they were unleashed, the polyarchy began to be taken over by agents of myriad wealthy corporations. Today, that takeover has been mostly completed. Legally, people still have power to choose their leaders, but the wealthy are still far better organized and able to maintain power.
Today we no longer have a polyarchy. It’s really to an oligarchy. That’s also a government by a small group of people, but it’s also for that small group.
How to improve our democracy
We could come closer to the ideal of a representative democracy with a parliamentary system. Currently, our parties don’t represent us well. They represent a few of us well, but many citizens favor issues that the wealthy don’t want to even talk about, and many share positions with both parties.
Personally, I favor a system where our representatives don’t have their own positions or philosophies. Instead, we vote on issues to say what we want, and they study and deliberate and find good solutions and compromises and report back to us. This would be possible with no changes in law, if we supported something like PeopleCount.org.
Can’t stupid people ruin a democracy?
There is a danger of stupid people voting stupidly, but we already have that with many Republican candidates (Gohmert, Inhofe…) and now Trump. Part of this, though, is a system that gives ordinary citizens no other responsibility than voting for a personality. Plus a broadcasting system that’s allowed to call propaganda “fair and balanced” and allowed to call editorials “news.”
If we had a decent system, though, perhaps the stupid people wouldn’t be so stupid or have such a poor choice of candidates. Part of the problem is as above- there’s no real reason to think deeply about issues since we only choose parties and personalities.
Please join me in fixing the first part. Support PeopleCount.org.