It depends.
In terms of having a pure democracy, of course you can't have everyone voting for every decision, so in that regard it isn't a democracy and the founders of the US specifically didn't want a democracy.
In terms of *having democracy*, of course it is, people are quite often voting and those votes get to select who gets to run things. In some states, they even have ballot initiatives where people get to vote on specific measures.
But as a liberal, a pure democracy isn't what anyone should want anyway. If you let people just vote to make whatever happen then the majority can simply vote the minority into slavery. The point of a constitutional republic is first to have the constitution limit what the state can do so you can't just bring in tyranny, and second to have the republic soberly and wisely decide what is best instead of just having the masses clamor for whatever is good in the moment.
The move towards increasingly relying on polls rather than principle is dangerous in this regard. If political parties shut their brains off and just become the voice of the polls, then first of all why do we need politicians, and second of all presumably all it takes is whipping the populace up into a fury over something and you could get them to vote for genocide.
In terms of having a pure democracy, of course you can't have everyone voting for every decision, so in that regard it isn't a democracy and the founders of the US specifically didn't want a democracy.
In terms of *having democracy*, of course it is, people are quite often voting and those votes get to select who gets to run things. In some states, they even have ballot initiatives where people get to vote on specific measures.
But as a liberal, a pure democracy isn't what anyone should want anyway. If you let people just vote to make whatever happen then the majority can simply vote the minority into slavery. The point of a constitutional republic is first to have the constitution limit what the state can do so you can't just bring in tyranny, and second to have the republic soberly and wisely decide what is best instead of just having the masses clamor for whatever is good in the moment.
The move towards increasingly relying on polls rather than principle is dangerous in this regard. If political parties shut their brains off and just become the voice of the polls, then first of all why do we need politicians, and second of all presumably all it takes is whipping the populace up into a fury over something and you could get them to vote for genocide.
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What most people forget about both Greece and Rome is that a huge portion of the population was slaves. Greece in particular, for all their literature and philosophy, could only sustain that because slaves did all the work.
When my wife wanted to get a dog for the first time, we ended up learning how to train a dog before we got one because my mom had a bad habit of getting dogs without knowing how to train them and they would shit and piss everywhere and be very badly behaved.
When you really start to look at stuff like Cesar Milan, there's one thing that comes up quite often and that is that many dogs who misbehave are doing so because they don't have anything better to do. You don't take them for walks, they don't have to help her sheep, they just sit around all day watching you watching TV. And they have all this energy, they are built to have work in order to survive, and so they start doing things like tearing up the furniture or digging useless holes in the yard, or barking at delivery guys.
If you look at humans as the animals they are, this really seems like it describes what's going on with our society. You have all these people with all this energy and all this drive to go do something, but for many of them there's nothing to do so they just wander around tearing up the furniture.
When you really start to look at stuff like Cesar Milan, there's one thing that comes up quite often and that is that many dogs who misbehave are doing so because they don't have anything better to do. You don't take them for walks, they don't have to help her sheep, they just sit around all day watching you watching TV. And they have all this energy, they are built to have work in order to survive, and so they start doing things like tearing up the furniture or digging useless holes in the yard, or barking at delivery guys.
If you look at humans as the animals they are, this really seems like it describes what's going on with our society. You have all these people with all this energy and all this drive to go do something, but for many of them there's nothing to do so they just wander around tearing up the furniture.
The conception of race as it exists in 2023 America is a unique and recent American invention that relies on the whole of American history to be coherent. You can see this in action when someone from Southern California gets confused about European race relations because they apply the American conception of race to another region with a different conception of race. You can see it with Whoopi Goldberg getting constantly in trouble for not understanding the holocaust.
For that reason, applying current views to 1776 isn't really a meaningful analysis. The English settlers would have come from England. the different political factions in England at that time would have been made up of native Englishmen, and the United States inherited a lot of systems from England including the entire common law legal system and the laser focus on the Roman Empire.
For that reason, applying current views to 1776 isn't really a meaningful analysis. The English settlers would have come from England. the different political factions in England at that time would have been made up of native Englishmen, and the United States inherited a lot of systems from England including the entire common law legal system and the laser focus on the Roman Empire.
Not disagreeing, adding historical context that I hope helps the broader discussion.
It's easy to forget that things we take for granted as permanent fixtures throughout history today are shockingly recent. The US civil war, for example, seems like ancient history, but it's conceivable that a gen Z kid could have parents who met the last slave or the last civil war soldier, even though I'll admit remembering them on the relevant time spans is a bit too much of a stretch.
Hell, in the grand scheme of European culture, the potato, tomato, corn, chocolate, peppers, avocados, vanilla, pineapples, and pumpkins didn't exist until the new world was discovered, so the majority of the historical record in Europe didn't have these things. Sugar existed in a form in asia, but refined sugar wasn't invented until the 17th century. Really goes to show just how insane development was during the renaissance and the enlightenment.
It's easy to forget that things we take for granted as permanent fixtures throughout history today are shockingly recent. The US civil war, for example, seems like ancient history, but it's conceivable that a gen Z kid could have parents who met the last slave or the last civil war soldier, even though I'll admit remembering them on the relevant time spans is a bit too much of a stretch.
Hell, in the grand scheme of European culture, the potato, tomato, corn, chocolate, peppers, avocados, vanilla, pineapples, and pumpkins didn't exist until the new world was discovered, so the majority of the historical record in Europe didn't have these things. Sugar existed in a form in asia, but refined sugar wasn't invented until the 17th century. Really goes to show just how insane development was during the renaissance and the enlightenment.