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'Are We Really Living in a Democracy?' Asks Sanders After Musk Drops $10 Million on US Senate Race
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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politics
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The U.S. has never been a democracy, never mind within our lifetimes. If voting is all that’s required to be a democracy then so are both China and Russia.
Gerrymandering, the practise of drawing funky voting districts to skew the results has been a practise since the early 1800s. Even so, votes don’t count on an individual basis.
In essence, politicians can manipulate districts to ensure that they come out as a majority despite having a minority base. If your vote loses in a district, it essentially doesn’t count. Further, if you win, it doesn’t go towards a presidential candidate, it goes to a some dipshit electorate who is meant to represent your voice in a separate vote, but they could decide to vote against your interests anyway. Then there’s the whole two party system aspect.
I get why people don’t vote. It’s entirely pointless because the system is a sham. The only winning move is to break it down and build something new.
I keep seeing responses along these lines and I feel that, while essentially correct, they oversimplify the situation in ways that are misleading.
The US government has undergone a huge qualitative change in the last year. It was far from perfect before then, but the rule of law, however badly realized, is now gone. The mechanisms are still there, and could still be restored, but when we have to ask whether the executive branch will abide by court rulings, we do not have it at present.
The current situation had its origin around fifty years ago, when the rich took over the Republican party, stopped acting in good faith, and began seriously gaming the system to take power and become richer. Before that, there were still plenty of issues, but we had been heading in the direction of improved civil rights and better protections for individual citizens. Now we have a two-party system where one of them does not represent most of its own members and is intent on completely subjugating the other party. It does not want to govern, it wants to rule.
Our system of government has always had problems, it has never been entirely fair, but it had been gradually improving over time. Acting as if nothing special has happened with that lately is ingenuous.
Couldn’t agree more.
However, yea, votes don’t count on an individual basis, that’s inherent to any decision making system that evenly splits decision making power between thousands of people of not millions (if not billions if you’d even hope for an actual world wide democracy)
That’s even the whole point of it. And no, I don’t mean that in the sense of how liberal democracies with unbridled capitalism make the average vote/voice meaningless compared to what a billionaire can achieve by spending only the tinyest fraction of his wealth. Indeed, a true democracy would and should make the individual vote/voice of any individual by theirselves meaningless, and that should include billionaires, self-serving autocrats and what not.