| Democracy isn't what you are, it's something you do. (Timothy Snyder's directly applicable talk on democracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY6LCOJbve8) If you vote, but your votes don't matter, you aren't a democracy. You are a democracy when your votes meaningfully influence policy. In that sense, we aren't even a democracy right now. It's worth considering that Russia has elections too. They aren't meaningful for many reasons. Real opposition candidates might be assassinated, or a candidate might be run with the same name to confuse voters, etc. Gerrymandering and unlimited campaign contributions are prime example's of how "It's all about how he comes to power" is correct, but your conclusion is flawed. Voting doesn't make you a democracy. Voting can be ritualized. Voting can be a form of cargo-culting (Feynman speech worth reading): https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm "In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they
saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same
thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways,
to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a
man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and
bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they
wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The
form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it
doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult
Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of
scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential,
because the planes don’t land."
America follows the apparent precepts and forms of democracy, but we are missing something essential because votes don't influence policy.There is much more to the idea of democracy than voting. |