To be fair, I'm not sure there are very many people who believe in US democracy right now.
If you know of a high quality poll showing a majority of people support turning the US into a non-Democratic form of government I'd be very interested to see it and I would be legitimately surprised.
The polls I see have at least 70-80% endorsement of the importance of democracy across the political spectrum.
The theoretical idea, maybe.
In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal, accepted practices that a lot of Americans (especially on one side of the two party system) accept and actively cheer on, because it's their side that is "winning".
You mention "checks and balances" but which ones are you referring to? All three branches of government are controlled by the same party. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be referring to anti-democratic putative "checks" within the executive branch. Those are nowhere in the constitution.
What's the big news right now? Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist." Sorry, that's democracy in action!
> In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal,
California's "independent redistricting commission" drew a map where republicans have 17% of the seats despite getting 40% of the vote. That's worse than Maryland's quite deliberately gerrymandered map, where republicans got 16% of seats despite getting 35% of the vote. "Independent" redistricting commissions get taken over by democrats in practice, like every other putatively non-partisan political body.
Didn't the Supreme Court, stacked by Republicans, decide that Presidents on official business are immune to prosecution, on a case against a Republican president? That's one massive check eviscerated for political reasons.
> Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist.
What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
The constitutional “checks and balances” are between the three branches. The prospect of the President being prosecuted by his own executive branch is not a “check” contemplated by the constitution. The constitution does not incorporate this modern idea of a “neutral justice system” that can be trusted to enforce the law regardless of politics. (If such neutral bodies existed, the whole tripartite system of government would be pointless.)
The DOJ, like virtually every group of lawyers, is 80-90% Democrats. If you posit an “independent DOJ” that can prosecute the former president, and leading candidate for reelection, then you’re envisioning a government where unelected Democrats hold permanent power over elections.
> What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
So we’re going to judge what’s “legitimately” racist through what Democrats think is racist? It’s like you’re trying to prove my point! Expanding the concept of “racism” to encompass unrelated beliefs and preferences is a liberal idea, and baked into almost everything NPR does.
Are you claiming that lying about Haitians eating pets to get people to vote for your anti-immigration platform isn't racist? How do you figure that?
[1] When I was a kid, my muslim immigrant mom told me not to marry a white girl because “they eat snakes.” I married a white girl, and she had in fact eaten a snake before. Culture is a real thing that exists, and it’s okay to prefer your own!
Democrats’ modern definition takes the social norm against declaring people inferior based on immutable characteristics and uses it to bash through cultural relativism and suppress criticism of cultural change. People have a moral right to use democratic means to create the kind of society they want to live in, and that includes policies to promote and protect their cultural preferences.
> I think God made all people good. But if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?
Nevertheless, his comments drew contemporary accusations of racism. So how modern are we talking about? This was well-trod discourse in 1992.
Buchanan and Vance had every possible culture to draw from to make their points, but they reached for Zulus and Haitians, two nations of Black people whose most famous historical event is a somewhat-successful war against White people. It strains credulity that this messaging is not fine-tuned to the electorate.
Soon you'll get to relive 1875, but now with cell phones.
Yes, it is. There is quite the leap from "preferring your own" to lying about a specific group are doing something morally objectionable, in order to reinforce your campaign's anti-immigration messaging, though.
And yes, it is racist to lie about a group of people you don't like to make them sound worse so that other people don't like them too.
Like it was racist when Nazis said that Jews control the world and ate children and whatever nonsense you can think of.
Targeting a specific group of people's immutable characteristics to slander them to paint them negatively fits your "original" definition of racism. The couch fucker treated them differently, by lying that they specifically are eating pets.
Nobody targeted anyone’s immutable characteristics. If you object to 10,000 Appalachians being resettled in your New England town, that’s not “racism.” It’s an objection based on not wanting them to do to your town what they did to their hometowns in Appalachia. It’s about peoples’ culture and how that manifests in the communities they create.
I think this is hard for liberals to understand because they’re so steeped in cultural relativism. They assume that cultural differences cannot be substantive—cannot shape the communities people create in substantive ways. So they cannot understand why anyone would object to mass settlement of culturally distinct groups except out of prejudice against immutable characteristics. Oddly, they seem to have this blind spot only for non-white people. Most would agree that West Virginia is the way it is because of West Virginians. But Bangladesh isn’t the way it is because of Bangladeshis, and it’s “racist” to suggest that importing 50,000 Bangladeshis to an enclave in the US would recreate dynamics that prevail in Dhaka.
And that's fine to say. However, it isn't acceptable to invent a story that these Bangladeshis are eating pets with the goal to get everyone else to hate them though, especially when the place in question actually majority likes them, and was even asking for extra resources to help them.
It's a public source too, so it doesn't cost you anything to support your claim. Are you recalling something that actually exists, or trying to warp the narrative into whatever supports your perception?
They raised the definition of racism by preemptively asserted that articles leveling “legitimate” accusations of racism wouldn’t count.
For example, here’s an article trying to tie Trump’s growing support among minorities to “multiracial whiteness” and minorities “embrac[ing] white power movements.” From where I’m standing that sure seems like calling minority supporters of Trump white supremacists.
We all know the answer to that question, unfortunately.
Edit: I'm not here to debate this or to defend that view, it's simply my observation of what people think these days, from my perspective here in Thailand.
In fairness, this has almost certainly been true of every governing system in the history of mankind. The powerful get to define the boundaries of the rules of society - the rest of us get to survive within those boundaries. Some government systems provide more flexibility within those boundaries than others - but at the end of the day, at their core - they are really all the same.