By Eric Zuesse

May 07, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  There are many partisan responses to this question. Of course, internationally, the United States is regarded by many people to be the gold standard of what constitutes a democracy (perhaps because the U.S. was the first nation that was born out of a successful revolution against an existing dictatorship and that quickly produced a written Constitution, which endorses many democratic principles and which lasts proudly till the present day). However, that reputation is not a substantive answer to the question as to whether the United States is today a democracy. There are dictatorships that have democratic written constitutions. Furthermore, the way that a constitution is enforced or not enforced can determine whether or not the nation’s constitution is real or whether it’s instead more of a mere formality than a reality.

Internally within the U.S., many people respond to this question about whether America is a “democracy” on the basis of their own political party, regarding whether or not the Democratic Party happens to be in power. Many Americans confuse a party’s name with the ideology that it’s supposed to adhere to. Many Republicans therefore respond to the question of whether the U.S. is a “democracy” by saying “America is a republic, not a democracy,” as if those two terms — the bases, respectively, for the Republican and Democratic Parties — were ideologically opposed to each other (as those two Parties always have been, but now they represent only two different factions of America’s aristocracy; neither of them represents the public, any longer). The actual question here is whether either Party does represent the public — and the answer to that is no.