I mean, Princeton released a study over a decade that the U.S. was no longer a democracy but an oligarchy. I understand that the author means where descending into authoritarianism, but this didn't start with Trump, and we left democracy behind a long time ago.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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The timing is worse than that. The study was only released in 2014, but it used data from 1981-2002, nearly 3 decades ago.
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Core - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
Shit, I assumed that data was relatively recent to the study's publication. It doesn't even cover Citizens United!
This is only news for brain-damaged americans.
Land of the $2-trillion military budget, and the biggest prison population. and in the last two years, your elected policitians sent $30 billions from your taxes to a genocidal aparthied because they represent and serve the interests of another country
Was it a democracy when women and people of color couldn't vote?
Was it a democracy when the two party system artificially limited your options in the voting booth?
I don't think it was ever a democracy.
Was it a democracy
Well, yes. Both the ancient forms of governance resembling what we call democracy and the Greek system that gives us the word Democracy typically excluded people to various degrees. Don't take that as a value judgement, I support anything that enfranchises more people, not less but I won't try to redefine words
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Nearly 1.5 million people can't vote in Florida because they've been to prison.
Guess how many votes Trump won Florida by in 2024?
Yeah the billionaires run that country
Since when was it ever a democracy ?
Yeah, ask the countries invaded and meddled by the US if they think the country is a democracy. What's happening is imperial boomerang. The quote below is very prescient and literally applicable to the US right now, emphasis is mine:
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind—it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
I don't want to sound gleeful at what is happening to the US as someone who is from a post-colonial country, but it is inevitable in the US as an imperial power that the corruption and brutality imposed on others had run out of space outside and then came back home. Imperialism, when there is no longer anywhere to conquer, conquers itself. This is what happened to many great powers of the past.
I am gleeful. Fuck USA, they tariffed my country for fun.
I don't wish harm to the everyday, honest working Americans, but of course I wish the worst on the bigots who must suffer the consequences of their actions for allowing Trump.
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Never has been
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