this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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The USA is not a true democracy in the academic sense of the word.
It's not very democratic in common sense as well.
There has never been a true democracy anywhere and anytime in history, even today.
Every democratic government in existence currently today is severely affected or influenced by monied, corporate, aristocratic, hereditary or powerful interests to some degree. Some countries manage it better than others but all of them fall short of a true democracy ... a system that is controlled by the people and benefits everyone equally.
Its just not a democracy.
IMO the US is de-facto like the ancient Roman republic, where plebeians, could vote but only for patricians, so "everybody" (ofc slaves and womens rights were neglected back then) could vote but all questions that were ever discussed in the senate were interests of patricians, same goes for political "coverage" and campaign elections.
So there was dissent and processes that were democratic on the surface but they exclusively revolved around the interests of the patricians.
The US is like that where patrician interests are replaced with capital interests. You can only vote multi-millionaires into the white house and the only issues to ever change are the issues of a fraction within the capitalist class (meaning someone living off of someone elses labour rather than their own).
If you belong to those capitalists you enjoy democratic representation, if not you can only decide which capitalist position you find better and vote for that.
A democratic republic more specifically
That's virtually meaningless. A "republic" is virtually any country that doesn't have a monarchy or dictator.
So drawing a distinction between a "democracy" and a "democratic republic" in this manner is a waste of time. There plenty of democratic monarchies, which are equally democracies, too.