“IS AMERICA A DEMOCRACY!!?” Ha! Compared to WHAT?
Like clockwork, the very day I promised this article, a channel posted "IS THE US A DEMOCRACY?" -- the idea is in the aether, that it isn’t, but compared to what?
"Bringing democracy to the middle east" has always justified US foreign policy since WW2 and being "The only democracy in the region" has often justified Israel, on the grounds that, according to "democratic peace theory", "democracies rarely go to war with one another", so that, while war is bad, waging war against non-democracies actually reduces war, so war is good! Right?
Wrong. Because, by this argument, the US should wage war on itself to "bring democracy to America".
What do I mean—isn't America the shining beacon, the light of the world and the poster-uncle for democracy itself? Well no, that last one was Athens, which was even less of a democracy, not giving votes to slaves or women, who had no say in ancient laws either.
I do currently believe, for instance, that the US is 'more democratic' than Russia and for that reason, a victory in the Ukraine would be a victory for democracy -- on the surface, but what will be the long-term net-effect on voting systems of either outcome?
Trudeau's election in Canada was promised to change the voting system here but it hasn't happened yet, even though our VOTING says change the VOTING SYSTEM -- how democratic is that!?
He promised us legal weed and electoral reform, gave us the weed, but our dreams, our aspirations, and our memories of voting reform promises disappeared in a puff of weed smoke and hypocrisy. But power never concedes a demand willingly, they say.
As it turns out, it's been proven that there are far more than this many logically possible democracies:
17976931348623159077293051907890247336179769789423065727343008 11577326758055009631327084773224075360211201138798713933576587 89768814416622492847430639474124377767893424865485276302219601 24609411945308295208500576883815068234246288147391311054082723 7163350510684586298239947245938479716304835356329624224137216
… which is more than the number of particles in the known universe. So what are the chances that US Democracy is absolute, a democracy so democratic that other democracies can only aspire to its democracy-ness? Well, they are smaller than the reciprocal, so, zero.
So, how can we ‘bring democracy to (north) america’? I've made many proposals on how to increase democracy:
1. FURTHER WORKER DEMOCRACIES AKA "DEMOCRACY AT WORK"
2. FURTHER STUDENT DEMOCRACIES AKA "DEMOCRACY AT SCHOOL"
3. IMPLEMENT DIRECT DEMOCRACY ON TOP OF REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY
4. IMPLEMENT VOTES-PER-DOLLAR VOTING SYSTEMS to 'get the money out of politics' by literally dividing it out mathematically.
This last proposal would be essential even if Israel and Palestine were wedded into a 'one person, one vote' democracy, for one Palestinian would not have the same voting power in the immediate aftermath of this conflict, since elections are so easy to buy, due to the fungibility of money and all the other mechanisms of manufacturing consent—this can be measured in the wealth inequality between the two resulting voting blocks, which is corrected for by this system.So, do NOT 'bring democracy to the middle east' if what you mean is the very minimal kind America has: bring more democracy to both America and Israel-and-Palestine by DIVIDING VOTES BY SPENDING TOTALS TO RANK THE WINNER -- the true mandate is that of he, or she, who wins by this metric. America is about getting rich, not buying elections!
(As it turns out, our true shining beacon which should guide us at this stage of democratic development internationally is actually Taiwan, a country many cannot even admit exists, on pain of professional cancellation, where a Pirate Party also does not exist, but only on a technicality, as Audrey Tang explains: In Taiwan, your party name cannot include a crime: piracy. At least Taiwan originally didn’t sign that copyright treaty, which cost us many lives during COVID because intellectual property limited which jabs companies could produce, instead of allowing all parties the safest ideas available, regardless of ‘owner’.
Intellectual property also killed by creating the incentive to monetize and therefore to over-prescribe the vaccine in the first place.)