Apparently, they do. FISA spying has been found unconstitutional since 2011, but they are keeping it a secret:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...
This is happening in the "beacon of democracy" of the world.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...
This is happening in the "beacon of democracy" of the world.
I'm not saying this to start a flame war, but to simply point out that the USA is no more democratic than many other Western nations.
(My personal opinion is that the USA is much more of a beacon of imperialism than of democracy. But that's neither here nor there.)
Not all Americans think of America as a "beacon of democracy", but pretty much anyone who does is themselves American. Also, rectangles are not squares, though squares are rectangles.
It was a Constitutional Republic.
"Republic" doesn't actually mean anything aside from "not a monarchy". When the founders of the United States wrote movingly about being a republic, they were firstly trying to emulate Rome and secondly trying to emphasize the then-popular Enlightenment ideal that monarchies were outdated and it was better to govern explicitly in the name of the people.
(The word "republic" emulates Rome because it's the term used by and for the Roman state. It's derived from the Latin "res publica", for "public property", which is exactly synonymous with the English word "commonwealth".)
Actually, in Athenian democracy, decision makers were elected through sortition [1] (drawing of lots). They considered elections to be the very mark of an oligarchic system, which is what (in my opinion) most so-called "modern democracies" have become. (As illustrated by the importance of parties and of a class of professional decision makers, namely politicians, who have incentives to increase their own power and limit the number of people who reach their status. Usually this is done by rigging the electoral system.)
I prefer the mediated kind of democracy (in spite of the tendency to oligarchy) as at least it tempers the rule of the mob.
In the USA the ultimate source of power is the Constitution of the US. It rules over the power of the people. Since the ultimate source of power in the USA is not the people it cannot possibly be a democracy.
...which starts with "We the people, for a number of good reasons, establish the following Constitution." So you're kind of stuck there.
If you're willing to draw these kinds of distinctions, no country is a democracy and the word is meaningless.
As for your second point: it contradicts reality. There had been even direct democracies (ancient Athens among many others) and, judging by the frequency that constitutions change around the world in most democratic countries you need just a referendum to entirely repeal the constitution.
Of all the hundreds of democracies established throughout history, almost all of them had governance through elected representatives and almost all of them had some kind of legal limits on what could be done through the democratic process (at least not without using some other democratic process to revise those limits). At that point, if you don't want to count them as real democracies, feel free to continue inventing your own language because you're not speaking the same English as the rest of us.
On what authority was the Constitution itself established if not the will of the people? On what authority does the Constitution assert its own if not, in its own words, "we the people"?
I contend that the people of the United States could do away with the Constitution the same way they did away with the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution even gives them a mechanism: pass a Constitutional amendment that repeals every preceding amendment and article and establishes a new Constitution on top of it. Once this legal maneuver was done, no one would ever need to read the original Constitution and its authority would be moot.
In fact, if you consider the idea that the Articles of Confederation were the original constitution, the fact that they are no longer in effect today even absent a formal mechanism in the Articles to abolish them shows that the Constitution could be replaced in the same way. "We the People" somehow had the authority to establish the Constitution in 1787--on what grounds do we not have the authority to establish a new one should we see fit?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Democracy_Index_2012_gree...
[2] http://www.democracyranking.org/en/ranking.htm
If we're talking about economic freedom or the freedom of press, it's even worse:
It is often used to evoke some sense of greater social justice.
Notice though, how notions such as 'willingness to invade other sovereign nations' or 'laws on books against fundamental human rights' or 'presence of any constitution or meaningful court of higher appeal' or 'centralization of media ownership' or 'measured trajectory of higher educational capacity' or 'number of excuses government can use to spy on or detain citizens' also seem conveniently out of scope.
Simply put, the notion we are sold of western democracy as some all-solving wonderland of equality and transparent empathetic good-governance is a farce. The more people lend rankings like these ones credence, the harder that is for people to see. (Though they certainly do have some utility, it is important also to see them critically.)
I bet the results will be nearly identical, if not worse for the US.