I have a really hard time with that answer. In a democracy each individual is directly and personally responsible for their government. That's the power and the responsibility associated with picking your leadership. You get credit for the good and the blame for the bad.
In an autocracy, it's murkier.
I haven't really picked many of my leaders. Most of the government is appointed by the president so I have no say in that. I only get two choices for president neither of which represent me much at all. My congressional district is gerrymandered so I don't get a say there. I have objectively close to 0 influence in how my government works or the decisions it makes.
If we ever fix our government to add more democracy or operate more on the opinions of the citizens then I might feel connected to what my government does but as it stands now there's very little connection between me and others around me and the government that takes actions on the world stage.
the gerrymandering is a really important issue. my city is split into n districts (where 10 < n < 15), each of which elects a representative to the city council. the city votes overwhelmingly blue, but there are clusters of people who mostly vote red in the more affluent neighborhoods. there are enough red voters (roughly 10% of total) that, if they were concentrated in one or two districts, they would actually have a chance of winning a couple council seats. but the democrats have been very careful to slice all red-leaning neighborhoods right down the middle to nullify their votes.
I'm not arguing the city would be better off with more republicans in office, but it's a good example to show how even affluent people can be totally disenfranchised in a political system. no matter how effectively these people mobilize, they will never win an election, even at the most local level, in the foreseeable future.
A single district electing say 20 people via a single transferable vote would be far more representive. The problem isn’t district boundaries, it’s first past the post.
Sortition with incumbency: if an incumbent wants to “run” again, flip a coin. All empty seats are filled by randomly choosing from a pool of volunteers.
Has the nice property of being well-nigh incorruptible, cheap to implement, and perfectly representative of the population interested in serving.
I also like the fact that it provides direct agency as a “voter” (volunteer to serve), rather than indirect agency (vote for a volunteer).
America isn't a pure Democracy in the sense of Plato's Republic.
America is a Representative Democracy. we vote, but we are powerless to change what our Representatives do on our behalf.
by the way, this is really where the root idea of a "Deep State" existing comes from. We vote for Obama to close Gitmo, then he doesn't do it and we never know why. We never voted for illegal NSA domestic mass surveillance, yet here we are and it's normalized. We never voted for CIA renditions, black sites, torture and political assassinations, yet here we are. We never voted for the Federal Reserve to give trillions of dollars to the richest megabillionaires to park that wealth in real estate and price ordinary people out of affordable housing, yet here we are.
it's no longer a crazy conspiracy theory to look at the catastrophic effects of FedGov and how nothing ever improves and conclude the reason is because the govt we think we have is not really in control, but rather a secret State-Within-a-State is in control. a Shadow Govt, a permanent class of faceless bureaucrats wearing dark suits who operate the machinery of Govt and who flaunt the efforts of our elected Representatives and who ignore the will of the voters.
if there ever was an entity that called for extravagent levels of hyperviolence unseen in history to overthrow it, the Deep State is that entity.
So you are just going to ignore the gerrymandering part of their comment then?
Yeah, that's true, gerrymandering is problematic and does stifle people's ability to express their political voice. Does gerrymandering make the US less of a democracy, then? I don't have an answer to that question, so curious your thoughts.
You were definitely right to call me out on that.
I think it does, yes. Voting in a gerrymandered region is pretty much just maliciously cargo-culted democracy. It might look like people engaging in a democratic action on the surface, but it doesn't have any effect.
It reminds me of the 'literacy tests' given to black voters, back in the Jim Crow era. We're doing this to help them participate in our democracy, the racists would say. But the reality was in fact the complete opposite.
The structure of the political system itself matters too - for example, this concentration of so much power into a single person, that the US and other countries have with the presidential model, gives them some very autocratic attributes as well.
I don't think it makes it less of a democracy, per se. after all, officials are still elected through a public vote, and the gerrymandering is carried out by democratically elected leaders. tbh I'm not even sure how you would get rid of it. political boundaries have to be drawn somewhere to begin with, and sometimes they may need to move if the population shifts over time. I dunno how you could make the current party in power redraw the lines in a way in a way that's fair to the opposition.
I do think your claim about citizens in a democracy ultimately being responsible for the actions of their government is a bit much though, or at least not very useful. individual voters may have opposed the victor in the election, or they may have grudgingly voted them in to avoid an even worse candidate.
The criteria is simple. Does gerrymandering spread power to the people or does it concentrate it in the hands of the few? If the latter, then it makes for less of a democracy.
It does. Anything that removes power from the demos makes it less of a democracy.