Your democracy has consistently voted senile 75 year olds for 3-elections now

The current president - who Americans voted for twice - is heavily accused of being a pedophile and has reneged on every one of his poll promise

Really not the best advertisement for democracy

I'm going off democracy, at least how it is currently implemented. It is proving far too easy to pervert.

It turns out that the people will vote for some terrible things in order to get that one petty little thing a given candidate promises and they want, or because they don't like something specific about the other candidate(s). And of course many may later say “well, I didn't vote for that” when they quite demonstrably did.

How can there be democracy in an environment where freedom of thought is all but nullified due to social manipulation through mainstream media. Calling something ‘free’ doesn’t make it so.

The reality is that the term democracy in western society has essentially become meaningless due to the swathes of algorithmic manipulation which occurs every second of everyday through every possible digital medium.

The moral weight of democracy is heavily overrated. Of course democracy is better than autocracy, all other things being equal. But I don't think a democracy that starts wars and bombs a new country every other year is morally superior to any relatively peaceful autocracy. Rather the opposite.

So that means the people are complicit in whatever wars the US started. Not sure if better or worse.

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried". Winston Churchill

> Ones a democracy one isn’t.

China characterizes itself as a democracy too, just not as a liberal democracy. There are democratic processes, although these are not free in the sense of liberalist ideology. The CCP justifies its control of the elections as a counterbalance to being corrupted by money, which starts to look like not an entirely unreasonable justification.

The CCP narrative also emphasizes "outcome orientation", i.e. that (democratic) legitimacy comes from people being happy about what the governance delivers, not about how it gets chosen. Which again starts to look not totally crazy, given western governments nowadays tend to have dismal approval ratings. And even after taking into account the likely biases in the polling, I do believe the majority of the Chinese truly approve of the CCP.

I'm not a fan of the Chinese system, but I think there are lessons we could take, and a binary "democratic or not" is not a very meaningful categorization.

Germany was (formally) a democracy when it fought the Soviets.

And why should anyone prefer a democracy over any other form of government? Doesn't it depend on the philosophy of each People?

"Not about moral high ground. One's an ideology my morals agree with, one isn't."

Democracy is a stretch

Can you clarify which is which?