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Comment by garciasn | Hacker News Reader

I think your comment is pedantic; while I appreciate pedantry, it's a bit absurd. It's a democracy; 'we' get what 'we' voted to have.

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America hasn't been a democracy for a long time if ever. Between voter suppression, gerrymandering, the electoral college, and Citizens United the government no longer meaningfully reflects the will of the people.

Also pedantic. Yeah, we're a republic not a textbook democracy. And we continue to elect representatives who further erode the power of the people via the means you mention. "We" could have elected Harris (or somebody else) and avoided the current mess, but "we" chose chaos and regression instead.

Unfortunately money seems to be able to buy votes. So it’s more like “they got what they paid for”.

As an appreciator of pedantry, what do you say to those who claim it's more of an "oligarchy" than a "democracy" in the United States these days?

'We' voted for what 'we' got. The Democrats did not message well enough to win over the majority of the popular vote nor the electoral vote; full stop. So; if we are indeed an oligarchy and not a democracy, the majority want to live in an oligarchy, find other messaging that the GOP puts out as more important in their individual day-to-day lives, or the messaging that the Democrats put out isn't resonating enough to overpower the GOP's.

That said, I don't believe in focusing on class-based politics in this day and age; the Supreme Court has made it clear that money is permissible to influence election outcomes and that can and does drive these sorts of structural shifts in politics to allow for the ultra-wealthy to massively influence political outcomes in our country.

TL;DR: I would tell someone that being under an oligarchy may be true (I cannot be certain as I'm not a political scientist), but there are other far more important issues TO THE GENERAL ELECTORATE that resonate better and should be the focus of future candidate messaging in order to win the election.

People were only given 2 options. The democrats didn't even have a primary. We didn't really get democracy. There are plenty of things that are broadly unpopular that elected officials do and it's a lazy oversimplification to say that that's what the majority want.

There was a primary, it just wasn't a hotly contested one. I voted in it...

That being said, there was no contest post Biden drop out, although there was a party alignment

The person that ran for office was not the person that won the primary.

We isn't what was written, so you've modified the original comment just to make your point where my comment was reply directly as written.

"You" is often plural.

and typically differentiated by declaring it the royal you

The royal y’all

> "You" is often plural.

If we're being pedantic (which we absolutely are at this point), "you" is always plural, and plurality is sometimes used to denote formality or respect for a singular subject (analogous to vous in French, or Sie in Germanic languages). It just so happens that we exclusively use the formal/respectful version in English these days.

The only truly singular singular second person pronoun in English is thou, which was the familiar form (although now because it is so archaic people ironically interpret it as more formal).

If we're being pedantic, then "you" used to always be plural. In present day English, it is both singular and plural.

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