Ask Lemmy

Many countries in Europe have functioning Democracies. The us is corporate special interests masquerading a two party voting system that maintains it's power by pantomiming democracy.

I think the biggest difference is that many european states have parliamentary democracies vs. the US' presidential democracy.

This, combined with mixed-member proportional representation voting systems, that more accurately represent the will of the populace in parliament, leads to a need for governmental coalition building, necessitating a more concilliatory and a little more non-partisan politics. While usually allowing for a more effective government, since the head of government represents a legislative majority.

It does have its own challenges and is far from perfect, but I think the current US government is a fitting contrast of a minority elected, non-concilliatory, highly partisan government that might become completely and utterly unable to do any governing by the midterms.

The US is also a good example that the age of a democratic system doesn't mean it's a good system. In fact I far prefer the very young post-WW2 german system to the very old american or british systems, though it could stand to learn some from the nordics, especially Finlands open list system.

You will get very different responses from Denmark, Albania, Switzerland and Belarus. Ancient greek democracy would look bad today with slavery and no women’s rights.

Europe is not one country, nor is it one democracy. It is 27countries that are all different. You would be better asking for specific countries ;)

Ancient Greece was not that much of "a democracy" either. I mean, there was no "Greek nation", there were cities and group of cities, and there were many non-democratic cities. Facing Athens, there was Sparta, their lifelong nemesis, which was not really a democratic city. The Athenian democracy itself lasted approx 200 years (a bit less, and with pauses) and its "golden age" (around that Pericles dude who gave it its first real democratic constitution among a few other impressive things) was very short lived: less than 35 years. And even then it was still a lot more... selective to determine who was deemed worthy of being a citizen (there were a lot less of them, only men and only from a certain group of population). Like I said, democracy was not “Greek” it was a “city” thing, as there was no such things as our relatively recent idea of a "nation" (or then, the city was the nation). There were alliances between cities though (but not always... spontaneous, nor reliable: Be it against of from Athens there were many betrayals) and there were almost many wars including against foreign powers.

Those countless wars is what, imho, put the Athenian democracy to the ground and this makes me wonder: could there be any modern democratic nation uneducated enough (and dumb enough to elect one of the most uneducated POTUS ever) to ignore that past experience and think it would be a great idea to start countless wars nowadays, and also to betray alliances?

Just wondering, obviously.

Seen from France, I would say the most obvious difference I can see between the US version of a democratic republic and my own is in how quite a few of our own representatives still at least try to pretend they work for us, and not in their own interest or in their friend's and sponsor's interests. That is changing, sadly.

It also looks like many US citizens consider the word 'solidarity' an insult, whereas it is (or was as, sadly, things are changing quite fast here too) a founding principle of the French Republic: it’s the ‘Fraternité’ part in our ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’.

On the plus side for the USA: up until quite recently, you used to have a real incomparable freedom of expression (which we dearly lack around here, all in the nae of political correctness), but its seems you decided to let go of it, for the same absurd reasons, as we did a few years ago.

You also used to be able to sustain and accept very different values and ideas, within the same space. That too is going away very quickly all in the name of intolerant ideologies (from the right as well as from the left side of your political spectrum)

And now, let the downvote festival begin. I suppose.

Ancient Greek democracy was their way to govern cities, not the country.

Newer times democracies were not conceptualized, but developed during their existence - maybe the exception was Germany after WWII.

A good listing of the specific differences may be this one linked from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

The original nations who had democratic values:

The italian sineoria republics, merchant republics, free citys in HRE, netherlands, the peasent republic of ditmarschen, roman senat after the fall of rome, the republic of venice: "are we a joke to you?"

Well European democracy is a democracy, for starters.

There is no "european democracy" heck we dont even have the same rules when it comes to voting the EU parliament. (Which is very dumb in my opinion)