this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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Yes thank you.
I cannot speak on the American system specifically. I think i disagree that the government tries to counter democracy. If that was the case, there would simply not be elections. The system as it exists in most countries is democracy as intended. As i said, Im making a conscious decision to not define democracy as something that does not currently exist in reality, and im naturally primarily looking at the state that i happen to live under, which is commonly described as democratic.
The average social democrat would agree If we said, the rich are working against democracy. If we just prevented bribes, biased media etc. we could vote for a party that will use the power of the state for the good of the people. I believe that to be impossible. A party either serves the national interest of performing well in international competition, or it has no chance at succeeding in democracy. Im afraid i cannot expand on this, as I do not feel ready to make a complete and coherent argument yet.
I think democracy and its institutions are the means to align the interests of voters with the national interests of the state, which itself are tied to the interests of domestic capital through taxation. But im not sure and i'll have to read more.
This puts you in contradiction with the actual designers of the American government, who identified various measures they made as being explicitly for the purpose of checking democracy. This comes up in the Federalist Papers, for example, as well as correspondences by Hamilton, Adams, and others.
Also, while I'm talking about the Founders, I can also point out an extremely obvious anti-democratic measure that has mostly been overcome: Only a minority of people were even allowed to vote! All of these measures are counters to democracy, but what could be more anti-democratic than that?
This is a false dichotomy, and let's use limited suffrage as an example: By letting only some people vote, you get a limited form of democracy that gets you the support of many of the people who can vote without needing to suffer the class antagonisms, etc. of the people who you don't want voting. But even this in isolation would be too democratic, again see the explicit statements of the founders, and so the scales were explicitly tipped in the direction of wealthier land owners with the Senate, which does not represent the population proportionately (and many other measures).
This is a fiction that does not hold up to looking at the explicitly stated intentions of many of the people making these systems.
Democracy is not a specific system of government, it is the degree to which people hold power. I am not saying "real democracy has never been tried", obviously there are significant democratic elements in liberal-democratic states, but I am saying that we need systems that are more democratic. If you are "making a conscious decision" to refuse to view anything as possibly more democratic than what we already have seen, then you are basically just question-begging away the possibility of a better world at all, of the merit of the creation of anything new.
The average social democrat is half right. The problem with them is not that they support these measures, but that these measures are in a broad sense impossible to accomplish by normative participation in the system for as long as capitalism is the overriding global force. The state will kill you before it lets you get rid of the Senate and all of its other measures to counter democracy, though it has many intermediary measures before resorting to that.
By what mechanism are they bound to be doing this? It's not like more taxes correspond to statesmen being paid more, and in fact they should receive only the same level of pay as any other worker rather than their current inflated pay on top of unlimited bribes. Under a more democratic system, someone's ability to hold office is contingent on them exercising the popular will, and if they don't then we can have recall elections to throw them out.
If you can't support something, my suggestion would be to not assert it.