Should we be striving for better ?

40 comments

  2. Humans are flawed. Thus, it is impossible for flawed creatures to create something that isn’t flawed.

  3. I guess the question is what flaw they’re talking about. Some of those “flaws” are actually a feature. Some of them really could use to be fixed.

  4. Part of the problem is that most of the ratings that consider America a flawed democracy, comes from nations where they consider Parliamentary Democracy to be the better form of democracy, and suffer from bias.

  5. Check out what is happening in Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida et al. We are definitely a flawed democracy and should do better.

  6. It’s flawed in a way that allows seditionists to continue exploiting the laws in ways that gives them advantages in elections and other ways to get the outcomes they want in judiciary hearings and gerrymandering.

    It is absolutely flawed. We’re seeing that now as people attempted to circumvent law or establish themselves as the grand leader of a potential theocracy/dictatorship.

    Edit: The seditionist J6ers and MAGAs must not like being called out

  7. There isn’t a perfect form of government. Every form is flawed.

    Good or bad depends on your own morals and beliefs.

  8. It’s not very good. Our 250+ year old system is kludgy as hell. A couple dozen junior college adjunct political science instructors could come up with something better over a weekend.

    Nevertheless, I will defend what we have. Why? Because if we the people were to decide to scrap it for something new, it would be even more fucked up.

  9. It is flawed and there are always things to work on, but that also doesn’t mean it’s a dystopia hellacape or something.

    Also one must be careful with indexes that amount to “how close are you to being a Nordic country”. Yes, they look at valid things but this is also too big and on so.e aspects frankly too subjective a question to readily boil down to a simple score or ranking and still be useful.

  10. Depends on what you mean by flawed and what particular things you want to change. If by flawed you mean not a pure democracy, I think that is a good thing. I think a mixture of democratic and republican institutions is good for the nation.

  11. America isn’t a democracy… it’s a representative republic.

    There are lots of checks on pure democracy in America- from the judiciary (very undemocratic life-long appointments for Supreme Court judges) to the electoral college (you vote for electors who can be unfaithful) to the senate representation (2 senators per state regardless of population).

    The founders liked democracy… but they didn’t love it and recognized its massive drawbacks. They tried to mitigate some of those with systems in the US in order to keep the mob mentality of pure democracy in check.

    So it’s not a _flawed_ democracy… it was never intended to _be_ a pure democracy.

  13. A democracy is a direct vote for what you want. Anything lower than Congress is a democracy. So if I want to vote for Mayor or Governor or City Councilman it’s a literal 1:1 vote

    But anything higher than Congress like the President. You don’t vote for the President. You vote for people that vote for the president. Your vote is like…a recommendation. So if everyone in your state votes for the Yellow candidate but the representatives of your state in the Electoral college vote Purple. The Purple guy wins. In some states the representative has to vote the same way as the state. But in many, they don’t.

    And that’s why it’s a flawed democracy. Because it’s not a full democracy. It’s a Republic

  14. That’s actually a common misconception that even our own politicians get wrong. The US is not a democracy, it’s a republic, which is similar to a democracy but it’s a completely different system

  15. You hear this kind of thing from leftists whose definition of “democracy” is contingent on whether it produces their preferred (left-wing) policy outcomes or not, or all sorts of other qualifications that are extrinsic to the actual definition of democracy. It’s a statement about how a country conforms to their own personal utopian vision of the ideal society. There’s little objective about such ratings, and they’re kind of meaningless.

  16. There’s always room for improvement for any country. I’m satisfied with this rating as it’s not uncommon for developed countries to be flawed democracies, but the US should always do better.

  17. Yeah we should strive for better. We should start by treating election denial the way they treat holocaust denial in Germany/

  19. Most of the people who say this don’t know why we have the system we have. As an example, many probably consider it a bad thing that we have gridlock making it hard to pass laws. However, that was a feature, not a bug, because even with the disaster of the Article of Confederations making it where most of the Founders wanted laws to actually be able to be passed, they also remembered the tyranny of King George so they didn’t want it to be too easy to pass laws. They don’t understand that, unlike their systems(potentially because Europe was a much rougher neighborhood than North America), we actually put a cohesive principle throughout our government: separation of powers. We are not them and the fact that ours was set up differently because the Framers had different influences and focused on different things than theirs doesn’t make ours any more flawed than democracies in Europe.

  20. It’s an imperfect Constitutional Republic.

    IMO there isn’t a better constructed government on the planet.

  21. I could totally be wrong, but I think ancient greece was the only true democracy. America has never been a democracy by it’s actual definition. At least not on a federal level. Individual states are kind of democracies though.

  22. Flawed Democracy literally means, and only means, that we do not directly elect our leaders, rather an electoral college does.

    That is the only thing it truly, genuinely means.

  23. It’s a democratic republic and a good form of government. Yes, there are other ways of governing but try to understand why we have the set up we do before demanding a change. The most likely outcome of change would make things worse.

    Except for the electoral college. It’s not worth keeping for any reason.

  24. To answer question 1, every democracy is flawed because none of them are perfect.

    To answer question 2, yes, I would like to see improvements like ranked choice voting.

  25. The supposedly better democracies have a ton of the same issues. Canada has a bigger housing crisis. UK has worker shortages due to brexit. EU suffers from high unemployment in some countries and lower salaries than in North America. Every country can be flawed if you want to pick it apart.

  26. Every democracy is a flawed democracy. It gives the power to the people and people are inherently flawed. A saying on the topic that I’m fond of is “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.” *All* democracies should be striving to be better. Every single one of them has flaws and every year we find more and more issues with democracy as a system as new edge cases emerge. Prevention measures get incorporated to prevent the same issue from occurring again, and it opens up new issues. We need to be constantly improving the system and I don’t expect that process to ever end. “We must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place.”

  27. America isn’t a democracy, it is a Republic with democratically elected representatives. The flaws are in many cases intentional so that majority rules can be counteracted if needed. They were trying to avoid the “majority rules” democracies that went after minority groups (ironic, I know). Additionally, there were at one time, better systems, like how the Senate represented the state governments, to prevent federal overreach and costs, but was changed to direct election, which eliminated the states’ ability to really tell the federal government to pound sand.

    Are there flaws, yes. Can they be corrected, also yes. Will they, maybe.

  28. America is the oldest democracy in the world. While that’s something to definitely be proud of, it also means that some of our founding principles may have been improved upon by other nations. *Yes*, we should be striving for better, but we also need to realize that we’re flawed not because our ideas are bad, but because even great nations need a little update now and then.

  31. We don’t have direct democracy and it probably wouldn’t be plausible on a national scale. Our system of representative democracy could be improved though.

  32. In theory, a representative democracy like what we have here is a great thing. You elect an official and they’re there to represent *you*. However, in reality, a lot of these politicians are in it for their own gain and they don’t really care about what their constituents want

  36. America is not a democracy. Never has been. America is a constitutional republic. The constitution guarantees the states a republican form of government.

  40. Is any system perfect? No. Does that mean it’s bad? Also no.

    “Perfect is the enemy of good [enough]”

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