Should the US be considered a democracy?

For well over half a century the United States has enjoyed its status as the world's strongest superpower and awarded itself the title of defender of global democracy many Americans see their country as the world's moral arbiter the shining city on a hill the standard by which all other nations should judge themselves the reasoning for this superiority complex mostly boils down to the notion that US citizens enjoy the purest most untainted Democratic experience the world has to offer free and fair elections equal representation universal rights and countless other indicators of a healthy and thriving democracy for an action is often seen as a threat to our democracy manipulated news is considered extremely dangerous to our democracy and elections are steeped in the language of democracy versus tyranny the u.s. is obsessed with the idea of democracy but if you dig a little deeper you'll find some worrying trends in this episode we're going to discuss what it means to be a democratic nation and take a look at some data that suggests the u.s. is not living up to the standards it sets for the rest of the world before we begin we need to get one thing out of the way there are plenty of people who will say well actually the u.s. is a republic not a democracy and then everyone starts yelling and suddenly no one remembers what we were talking about in the first place I'll try to make this quick the definition of democracy is a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state typically through elected representatives the definition of Republic is a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch you can see why people can get a bit confused to make a long story short Americans have been arguing about whether the country is a republic or a democracy since the very founding of the nation and that probably won't change anytime soon the best consensus we can reach is that the United States can be classified as a democratic republic for a representative democracy our system of governance has characteristics of both Republic and democracy people who claim otherwise are generally just out to derail the conversation in this video we'll be discussing the aspect of American life which are supposed to be democratic things like voting and elections the main goal here is not to determine whether the u.s. is a democracy in the Republic vs. democracy sense but whether the nation lives up to the standards it supposedly represents and by which we judge the rest of the world let's start with a brief look at the nation as a whole what is it what does it represent the u.s. is the richest nation in human history home to some of the very wealthiest people on the planet it's also a nation of crushing inequality the richest three people own more wealth than the bottom 160 million Americans and Jeff Bezos founder of Amazon and the richest man on earth makes more money in one minute than the average American household earns in almost two years the u.s. is home to the world's most powerful military by far we spend more money on our military than the next ten highest spenders combined in theory this massive force is purely for national defense but the country has proven that it's more than happy to use military action to establish regimes more amenable to US interests for example we've instigated or supported no fewer than 56 coos in Latin America since the 1950s not to mention the Middle East often toppling democratically elected governments this is in stark contrast to our nation's preferred image as the defender of global democracy geographically the u.s. is prime real estate as Otto von Bismarck once put it the Americans are a lucky people they're bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors and to the east and west by FISH this geographical luxury has allowed the nation to flourish unbothered by the goings-on of other countries and able to spend its money not rebuilding after the world wars like european nations but in other areas strengthening its military to become the sole world superpower and establishing massive international corporations and yet with all this wealth and superb geopolitical positioning the u.s. still fails in several key metrics some 40 million of its people live in poverty with another 10 million right on the brink American health care is consistently rated the worst in the developed world with thousands dying or going bankrupt every year thanks to the extraordinarily expensive system in 2018 America was added to the list of most dangerous nations in which to be a journalist and that was before the targeting of journalists by police in the wake of the murder of George Floyd these should all be red flags on their own but if we're talking specifically about democracy we need to look at more testable areas of civic life for the rest of this video I'll be drawing some data from a report titled testing theories of American politics elites interest groups and average citizens which was published in 2014 in the journal perspectives on politics you can find a link to the study in the description in this report the off set out to test for theories of American political power essentially trying to measure who's voice matters in American politics these four theories are majoritarian electoral democracy economic elite domination and two types of interest group pluralism majoritarian pluralism and biased pluralism to put it in slightly easier language the groups are average citizens the wealthy and powerful and large organized groups either popular or business oriented in the ideal vision of the country many Americans would want the balance to be skewed towards average citizens and popular mass movements as domination by the economic elites or business interests would indicate less of a democracy and more of a plutocracy or oligarchy that is ruled by a minority of wealthy players if you polled a sample of Americans about what they think the ideal form of democracy would be odds are the vast majority would say one-person one-vote everyone's interests are given the same weight a large portion of the American population believes that we already experienced this ideal form of democracy the authors of the report come to a very different conclusion over the course of their testing by pitting the four dominant theories of American political power against one another using a data set consisting of nearly 2000 policy issues they reached the exact opposite conclusion they state we have been able to produce some striking findings one is the nearly total failure of median voter and other majoritarian electoral democracy theories when the Preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for the Preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule near zero statistically non significant impact on public policy they go on to say interest groups do have substantial independent impacts on policy and a few groups particularly labor unions represent average citizens views reasonably well but the interest group system as a whole does not overall net interest group alignments are not significantly related to the Preferences of average citizens the net alignments of the most influential business oriented groups are negatively related to the average citizens wishes so not only our business interest not in alignment with the will of the voting majority they are directly opposed to it this should not come as a surprise when extremely wealthy individuals and corporations are allowed to dump as much money as they want into politics it would stand to reason that their desires hold more weight to those receiving the contributions these graphs from the study sum up the findings pretty well regardless of average voter desire for legislation on any given issue the odds of Representatives delivering the desired result is the same contrary to this we see a strong correlation between economic elite and special interest desires and legislative action this should be alarming because if our votes are meaningless then we don't actually have any say in how the country is run that would mean our system is not democratic okay but if our votes are meaningless why do politicians try so hard to convince people to vote for them well think of the optics without a significant number of votes from the population the country would not be considered Democratic at all the illusion of the shining city on a hill would be shattered and the decidedly undemocratic oligarchy laid bare for the rest of the world to see so those votes from average citizens are crucial but by actively seeking votes and encouraging voting politicians open themselves up to the undesirable possibility of being voted out if only there were some way to ensure that vote totals from states would always deliver the desired outcome enter gerrymandering has a quick crash course on state level politics each state is divided up into voting districts of similar population sizes to facilitate the process of voting and establish a number of seats to be filled by representatives make sense but what doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a Democratic standpoint is how these districts are drawn in America much to the bafflement of foreign politicians those currently in elected positions get to draw their own district maps think about that for a second in a democracy the citizens should be able to vote for the representative of their choice what we have is the opposite representatives get to choose their voters they can draw maps that exclude certain populations or pack in as many of a certain type of voter as possible that's part of the reason district maps often look so strange they've been carefully crafted to deliver the desired result think what you will of John Oliver he's got a pretty good episode on gerrymandering here's a useful explainer from the show The Washington Post showed how this can work look at this hypothetical state it's 60% blue voters 40% red and it needs to be carved up into five districts now proportionally you would want three blue and two red districts but if you draw the lines like this you can get three red majorities and two blues and if you draw it like this you can get five blue majorities and no red and if you draw lines like this it looks like a dick which is and before you go calling me a partisan hack I'm opposed to gerrymandering from both parties and you should be too both Democrats and Republicans do it and while it's technically not illegal it should be it gives politicians tremendous control over the outcome of elections and that should not be acceptable in a healthy democracy but perhaps even more egregious than gerrymandering is outright voter suppression there is no right more fundamental to democracy than the right to vote it's always been in the interest of some politicians to dissuade certain voting blocks from casting their ballots or to make it more difficult for them to do so but in recent years voter suppression has reached levels that would cast doubt on the legitimacy of our elections if they were to take place in any other country repressive voter ID laws voter roll purges gerrymandering is also a form of voter suppression but at least those responsible for questionable district maps can hide behind the technical legality of their actions what we're seeing out on the voting trail is much more alarming instead of going to all the effort of trying to convince people not to vote those in power have taken to simply closing polling locations so voters don't even have the opportunity this has been a widespread problem in recent years and it's finally starting to get the attention it deserves take the Kentucky primary on June 23rd in a normal election year Kentucky would have over 3700 polling stations available this time around they slashed that number to under 200 nearly half of Kentucky's black voters live in a single County Jefferson County had just one polling station one polling station for over three quarters of a million residents this will lead to multi-hour wait times that most voters simply won't be able to manage people have to work and if the wait is eight hours long which is becoming more and more common the majority of voters won't be able to cast their ballot the practice of closing polling locations is particularly insidious because those doing the closing can say look everyone had the opportunity to vote there was a polling station open but in reality if you can't afford to wait in line for an entire day you do not have the opportunity to vote what those in power are doing is making it impossible for the people to make their voices heard they are denying Americans their most fundamental democratic rights at what point do we have to admit that our elections are illegitimate and undemocratic we're not shy about stepping in when other countries conduct fraudulent elections so why should we get a free pass to return to the study we discussed earlier in their conclusion the author's state what do our findings say about democracy in America they certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of populistic democracy who want their governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens in the United States our findings indicate the majority does not rule at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes when a majority of citizens disagrees with the economic elites or with organized interests they generally lose moreover because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change they generally do not get it they end by saying we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened and they're absolutely right in fact I'd go even further and say that the United States is no longer a democracy if our districts are gerrymander to all but ensure a certain outcome if our polling stations are closed making it impossible for us to vote if the desires of average voters are disregarded even with an overwhelming majority if corporations and the ultra wealthy can simply buy their desired legislation we're not living in a democracy we're living under an oligarchy the thing we need to realize is that this is not some unfortunate and unforeseeable outcome this is the system functioning as intended at least as intended since the 1980s crippling precarity for the many to build the ever-growing affluence of the few with no way to challenge the status quo by electoral means crumbling infrastructure juxtaposed with glistening new corporate campuses and headquarters tens of millions of Americans laid off during a global pandemic while the richest handful of people become even richer and the stock market hums along nicely we need to come to grips with the fact that there has been a consensus in American politics for decades now the Democrats and Republicans represent two wings of the same party dedicated to maintaining corporate dominance ask yourself whose voice matters in American politics whose desires are taken into consideration our tax laws benefit the rich our environmental laws benefit corporations you ian's have been gutted and all but destroyed to remove workers bargaining power our news networks are owned by the rich and politically-connected our health care system is a massive for-profit industry that turns human suffering into giant checks for politicians and all the while the two major parties put on a bit of political theater slandering each other as the ultimate evil when their economic interest aligned on just about every issue they trade places every few years voters feel vindicated and disappointed then vindicated again as their preferred party goes through the motions with one hand behind their back reaching for corporate donations in a true representative democracy the will of the people would matter our votes would matter you don't have to look very hard to see that isn't the case the United States should not be considered a representative democracy