No. And I haven't for a while now. Looking at your electoral system (electoral college, gerrymandering etc.), it probably never was but it was never as obvious as it is now.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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also the media influence on elections is out of control
I grew up in the US and have lived outside it for 10 years now. I would agree with this. Voting and representation have never been total and is definitely less available for many groups. Further things are being stripped away.
Yeah. My wake-up call was quite early in life, when SCOTUS handed the election to GWB. If I was born a generation earlier I'd have called it with Watergate. If I was an ancestor currently dead, I would have called it around the time an assassin put the presidency in the hands of the opposite party, and a drunk asshole subsequently decided reconstruction efforts should fail. Or possibly just prior, when we somehow decided not to hang every man Jack of the confederacy for treason.
Edit: an earlier still version of me would have overseen the death of a culture brought on by poxy mad white religious extremists, and laughed ruefully to hear that centuries later the utter bastardy continues unchanged.
exactly, two party system completely pulls the pants down for top1% lobbyism to be rampantly in control
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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.
As a German also I agree with this statement. Ostensibly it is a democracy but in reality it's not. And yes, there is a lot of rhyming going on
lol
The US had always been a questionable democracy with the hyperfixation on the president and just two parties setting the agenda, but I'd argue that it's still a democracy, though it is a rapidly deteriorating one.
On paper, I guess so? In reality, and as is the case with pretty much every developed democracy, money and technology make a mockery of the whole idea. A society in which billionaires can buy their way into the Whitehouse - literally - is no democracy.
on paper.. .checks paper Democratic People's Republic of Korea... checks out
Anyone who is eligible to vote, and chooses not to, implicitly throws their support behind whoever wins.
On 2024-11-05, ⅔ of US citizens who were eligible to vote told the rest of the world they don’t want to be taken seriously for at least 2 years.
Noper....
Absolutely not. A two party system was barely nominally a form of democracy. Current government walks like a dictatorship and quacks like a dictatorship. They might hold a fake election one day like many of those do, but still no.
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Am Dutch. I have considered the US an incomplete democracy since I learned about voting in school. It’s not one person one vote, which to me is crucial for a democracy. The US right now is still a nation of laws, but democracy is sharply in decline. The voter-roll issues and Gerrymandering come to mind immediately. Not to mention the fact that guaranteed access to polls has been pulled by the courts. Which is insane to me.
Also president having so much power was clearly never democratic to begin with as we can see it all play out now.
The power of the president did not start out like this. Congress kept giving their power to the executive for political reasons.
It happened over centuries.
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Nope. I see it as an autocracy run by an elite oligarchy.
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.
Line in the sand? Going after political opponents. Censoring information. Dismantling media. Abandoning rule of law. Business and government mixing too much.
USA is speed running these.
I consider it an autocratic regime with strong fascist characteristics.
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First off, I'm an American. Born a stone's throw from the location of one of the critical events in the history of the American revolution.
To answer the question, no. Leaving aside the whole Republic versus democracy argument, my point of realization was when one party seized upon a minor technical issue and disenfranchised countless voters via lawsuit, sufficient to allow the race to be called in their favor.
I'm sure there are many readers who believe I'm talking about 2016. For those readers, your keyword search is "hanging Chad".
I consider it a faux democracy. It still has the semblance of one, with people voting, believing they matter and that they have actual free speech, but the masses are being, increasingly less subtly, controlled by media corporations and rendered incapable of critical, independent thinking by an ever decreasing quality of education.
Don't be fooled though! This isn't happening in the US alone. It is widespread all over the globe. The US is simply doing it in a smarter, more cunning way, while leading the wealthy 1% in other countries by example.
It was never a democracy.
Absolutely not. A country where two parties are the only two viable electoral options, is absolutely not a democracy. Doesn’t mean I’ll stop my membership for the PSL.
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Not at all, you are just an autocracy now but don't fully realise it, and as the other commentator had said, not even really a good democracy in the loosest of terms before this entire mess going on ATM!
I consider it a lesser democracy / something that barely qualifies for a few years now.
No but this isn't recent. My line in the sand was Russian interference in the 2016 US election that came to light in 2018.
*United States Democracy Index