The US: A Democracy that Barely Is.
Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, India, December 4th, 2016.
Salaroche


If the 2016 presidential election exemplifies in any way the workings of American Democracy, US elections are no longer a contest between the Democratic Party and its Republican counterpart. They are now a rivalry between rural backward states and urban progressive ones, where the former contribute less money to the national treasury but get more rebates from the Fed and more voting power at the ballot, while the latter contribute more money to the national treasury but get less rebates from the Fed and less voting power at the ballot.

What kind of Democracy is that? Does it really sound like a Democratic system at all?

In real terms this means that populous, liberal, rich, entrepreneurial states like California end up footing the bill for dogmatist, old-fashioned, financially-meager, relatively-deserted states like Wyoming and in return the latter gets more money back from the Fed and more electoral power to boot.

Is this the concept of equality among citizens the United Sates so proudly flaunts around the world? The more we talk about the Electoral College the more American Democracy sounds either like a humorless joke, a built-in right-wing scam, or both.
 
Just picture that the vote of any citizen from Alaska, Hawaii, or the Dakotas counts somewhere between 2 and 3.5 times more than that of anyone from New Jersey, Minnesota, or New York. Can you believe that such biased, lopsided system is still considered today one of the best democratic systems in the world? Isn’t such archaic, ill-conceived electoral method a clear affront to the idea of Democracy in the 21st century? There is no such thing as political equality in the United States, and if there is, citizens from backward rural states are much more equal than those from urban progressive ones.

What will it take for those blockhead American politicians, philosophers and political thinkers to come to their senses and finally decide to get rid once and for all of such outdated, ultra-inefficient, highly-biased, undemocratic electoral system? Just think about the over 2.5 million Americans who were blatantly disenfranchised this past election with no legal or political recourse to redress such arbitrariness. Shouldn’t this be the right time to say “enough is enough!?”

American Democracy? Go figure.

Salaroche