Sure, though the developments are worrying. If Donald gets a third term, I will consider USA an autocracy.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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The amount of voter suppression, the broken FPTP system and mass media influence over the US electoral system, means that for all intents and purposes, the USA federal election is just picking your favourite of the two viable owning-class-endorsed candidates. "The people" never had a realistic chance of representation or empowerment. This is not a new critique, it's been discussed for at least a century and a half.
There is simply no real value in calling the USA a democracy at any point during our lifetimes, regardless of whether you are allowed to vote or even write-in candidates, regardless of the two-party system, because the power imbalance between the working class and the owning class surrounding that vote makes it as much a sham election as Russia's sham elections. But even compared to other (until recently) close allies, the US implementation of federal voting has long been an absolute circus.
It hasn't been a democracy since it had the 'electoral college' and unequal representation. So, forever..
But within the context of the previous status quo - I'd say it stopped being a democracy exactly when Trump was allowed to be a candidate for the presidency after the Jan 6 coup attempt, and parallel attempts to invent votes and pressure states to lie about their vote counts. Which was blatantly unconstitutional and illegal. More than enough evidence to bar him from being a candidate, and yet the senate allowed it to proceed - that was the end.
One interesting thing I haven't read here yet (haven't read all the comments though) is religion. Sure, officially there's separation of church and state, but Christianity is everywhere in your country, including government. The amount of times I've heard "God bless the United States" being said is ridiculous. To me, that's undemocratic and I would feel very uncomfortable with that as an atheist.
Yeah, it's a cheap knock off Christianity, too. It's just there for the subjugation of people who cannot be bothered to think for themselves.
Christianity Lol
No my friend these people worship Mammon. They were taught to believe it was god
Of course you would be uncomfortable with that because you're an atheist... You're an atheist. The US has freedom of religion, this freedom also applies to government officials.
Not when they have the Electoral College bullshit upending every election in favor of a minority.
If this is true how to democrats win elections?
Well, it takes a bigger portion of voters voting blue just to reach equilibrium, which then results in a few swing states because that's the stupid system they have. The whole purpose is to dilute the blue vote so Republicans can have a coin flip chance. So whoever wins the swing states instead of the popular vote wins the election. One example is Trump vs Clinton. Technically, Clinton won the popular vote but not the electorate.
So, really, it's not "why are Dems winning elections?" but "why are Reps winning them at all?"
No, because I'm sure it's passed the tipping point towards autocracy. There's endless different forms of both it and democracy, but it's a constant that democracy begets democracy and autocracy begets autocracy, so that's my "line in the sand".
In America's case as of now, all the checks and balances that used to work are still there, but they've been questionable for many years and aren't going to do anything going forwards, so they're functionally more like Canada's monarchy.
If you're looking for a perspective on what's normal and what's not, consider that when there's a big social problem in Canada, it's only a matter of time until a law trying to address it gets passed. That's what a functioning democracy is like. Meanwhile, there's been a known place in the US where no courts have jurisdiction to prosecute serious crimes for two decades now.
For a long while I thought America was a democracy but that the population was rather uneducated. Their media and culture seemed to glorify ignorance and shame intellectualism.
I now consider America a fascist state, early stages. I've seen too many simulations to know that the level of organized resistance required to prevent the descent into fascism is either too morally grey or too risky to be worth it. It must get much worse before resistance is meaningful.
At best an American is a victim, at worst they are a fascist.
Resistance to early fascism is not morally grey or too risky.
Whether it's effective when 90% of the population is made of shallow, consumerized brainlets is another question.
Never have
To me it never really was. If you look into how they do voting here, its insane, really.
US citizens always loved to make these "we'll bomb some democracy in to you" but they never brought democracy either. I think it's fair to say that no other country started asa y dictatorships as the US has
Add to that;
Bush lost the election and became president anyway.
Trump has heen successfully lying his way through the past four years (and well, yeah the 4 years before that too) instigated an insurrection and was never held accountable
So many people not reading the "people outside the US" part.
If a presidential candidate can lose an election and still become president, it's not a democracy.
Why should all the densely populated urban centers be the only people with control over the federal election?
American political system can very easily produce a new authoritarian leader, the president has much more power and with Congress majority can easily turn things around. The fact it hasn't happened before is a great achievement. Looking at everything Trump administration has been doing is to concentrate power at the top and to become new dictatorship. It wont be Trump, maybe JD Vance who knows.
It depends on what the Americans will allow to happen, cause I feel that Americans are getting pissed harder each year and many large protests will happen. Is it going to be a wakeup call to become democratic and sensible again or full dictatorship only time will tell.
It is still a democracy, but that democracy is in crisis. You will know over the next 2/years if it will survive, although the next federal election will be the real test.
- if the judicial and congress still share power,
- if elections are still fair.
Democracies can recover if they keep their representation.
Elections in the US aren't really all that fair TBH.
Researchers at the Brookings Institution agree that the strategic manipulation of our electoral process is largely to blame for the erosion of US democracy in recent years. Brookings says this manipulation takes various forms: the intentional addition of administrative barriers to voting, unfairly drawing electoral maps, the subversion of the election certification and counting process, and the violent coup attempt on January 6, 2021.
The United States is experiencing two major forms of democratic erosion in its governing institutions:
- Strategic manipulation of elections. Distinct from “voter fraud,” which is almost non-existent in the United States, election manipulation has become increasingly common and increasingly extreme. Examples include election procedures that make it harder to vote (like inadequate polling facilities) or that reduce the opposing party’s representation (like gerrymandering).
- Executive aggrandizement. Even a legitimately elected leader can undermine democracy if they eliminate governmental “checks and balances” or consolidate power in unaccountable institutions. The United States has seen substantial expansions of executive power and serious efforts to erode the independence of the civil service. In addition, there are serious questions about the impartiality of the judiciary.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-democratic-decline-in-the-united-states/
One thing that I think they may have missed in this analysis is erosion from the inside. Our supreme Court overturned or instituted a couple major rules that have allowed corporations to funnel billions of dollars directly to politicians with citizens united decision, then helped erode administrative functions of government by overturning Chevron deference. When you combine that shit with the way we allow corporate lobbying in the US, we're not even close to "democracy" in this shit hole. It's a corporate oligarchy masquerading as a republic/democracy. Corporations own this country, the government protects them, that bullshit you hear about the "land of the free" is about corporations not individuals.
Speaking on the federal level (have less of a view on the local and state level). It was a very flawed democracy, and it's descending a less and less functioning system as we speak, moving towards some form of fascism/techno feudalism.
I never considered it a democracy. It's one-party system with two parties, what can be democratic about it? Smoke and mirrors.
Nope, it's an oligarchy pretending it's a democracy.
People seem to think freedom and democracy are synonymous. Places can be free, but not have democracy; places can also have democracy and not be free. When a simple majority of the voting public supports cracking down on freedoms - you will have one of the two, but you can't have both.
I barely considered it a democracy as a two party system as the elites controlled it all, but now it's just even more messed up. They need to hold people accountable and not elect criminals to office.
I fear for the future of America as a country.
Is anywhere really?
When was the US the last time a democracy?
You can vote democrats or republicans, which mostly get bankrolled by the same rich assholes. As a normal citizen of the US you have almost no influence at politics at all, because the media is controlled by rich people, the biggest internet platforms are controlled by rich people, elections are paid for by rich people, ...
The current situation is not a spontaneous, miraculous, magical result of Trump and his gang, it was years in the making by lobby groups, influential/rich/powerful people and neo liberal brainwashing of the masses.
Same holds true for most other western so called democracies.
Absolutely not. When laws don't apply to the president, the jig is up. Trump clearly plans to be in power forever. Either there won't be elections or they'll be rigged.
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For me, the US is still a democracy with elements of an authoritarian regime. Yes, I believe this can happen in any country, including mine, if the elected party or a wealthy figure decides to amend such authoritarian, manipulative, and exploitative policies.
Not since I saw this graph:
From this paper:
This was published in 2014, back when Obama was in office.
The institutions are completely captured. Yes, even the ones you thought were on your side all this time.
I am a bit too dumb to understand that graph and asked ai for an explanation. It helped me, maybe it also helps others:
This graph comes from a study by Gilens and Page that examines how different groups influence U.S. policy decisions. It has three separate charts, each showing how policy adoption (whether a policy is enacted) relates to the preferences of different groups:
1. Average Citizens’ Preferences (top chart)
2. Economic Elites’ Preferences (middle chart)
3. Interest Group Alignments (bottom chart)
Breaking It Down:
• X-axis:
• In the first two graphs, it represents how much each group supports a policy (from 0% to 100%).
• In the third graph (Interest Groups), the x-axis shows alignment, with negative values meaning opposition and positive values meaning support.
• Y-axis:
• The left y-axis (dark line) shows the predicted probability of a policy being adopted.
• The right y-axis (gray bars) shows how often different levels of support occur in the data (percentage of cases).
Key Takeaways & Surprises:
1. The top chart (Average Citizens) is nearly a flat line.
• This means that whether the general public strongly supports or opposes a policy has little impact on whether it gets adopted.
2. The middle chart (Economic Elites) has a rising curve.
• This suggests that policies supported by the wealthy have a much higher chance of being adopted.
3. The bottom chart (Interest Groups) also shows a strong upward trend.
• The more interest groups align in favor of a policy, the more likely it is to be adopted.
Big Picture:
This graph suggests that the opinions of average citizens have little to no effect on policy decisions, while economic elites and interest groups have significant influence. This challenges the idea that the U.S. operates as a true democracy where the will of the majority decides policy.
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I'm inside the US, and the federal government is most certainly no longer a democracy. It still has all the trappings, but corruption will ensure that the will of the people is secondary to whatever those in power want - even more than has been the case in the past. Locally, democracy is still practiced, in places like blue states.
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.
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See, as a German, when I see a country go down the same route as the Weimar Republic after handing over the power to the Nazi party, I think it's just very obvious. Hitler took some two months to completely destroy democracy, and the US are juuust in the middle of that. History doesn't repeat, but sometimes it rhymes, and the similarities are just remarkable.
So yeah, I guess that would be a big fat trench in the sand.
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No.
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.
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Nope Trump proved yet again the US is a Russian puppet today earlier in the week Ukraine destroyed a huge Russian Oil plant. Now a few days later Trump is giving them a Ceasefire against energy targets which Putin supposedly broke just a mere 3 hours later.
If anything this proves two things Ukraine really hurt them with that attack and Trump is again proving he's Putins lapdog and acting outright against Ukraine and Europe.
Actually saw some combat footage of that Ukraine attack and it looked almost like a nuke, from what I remember it's a 1000km ranged missile called Neptune.
Democracy is an umbrella term. These are the types of democracy the US is:
-
Representative Democracy
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Constitutional Democracy
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Presidential Democracy
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Liberal Democracy
Types of Democracy the US is not:
-
Direct Democracy
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Parliamentary Democracy
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Illiberal Democracy
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Participatory Democracy
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Social Democracy
So yes, it's a democracy.
You are confusing a lot of pol science terms, as well as using some which aren't part of pol science at all.
All modern democracies are representative democracies, as in voters votes for representatives to represent them. Switzerland has elements of direct democracy, but on a foundation of representative democracy as well. Constitutional, presidential and liberal democracy are not an actual meaningful terms in political science.
Technically the US is a representative democracy, but I am pretty sure OPs is asking about the practice of the thing. And the practice is very different from the written word about how it was supposed to be, especially this recent presidential term.
Not for quite some time now. Not since I learned about the electoral college.
No and it hasn't been for a long time. As long as you can buy influence via lobbying then the playing field is not level.
The difference this time is they are not trying to hide it anymore
A struggling democracy, in the beginning of an Orban/Hungary-like overtake of the country.
Its possible to revert, but you seem to have atleast a 1/3 of the country that would walk down a straight up facist line willingly and happily do so.
You need to fix your shit america.
lol
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