LLA 5/28 Response

This day's topic was democracy. According to the dictionary, it says democracy "is a form of government in which all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives." If this definition is correct, would the U.S. be considered democratic? First of all, I was surprised to know that the concept of democracy was born in Athens a long time ago. Its root words are demo, meaning "people" and kratos, meaning "government." So democracy is literally SUPPOSED to mean the government of people. There are some contradictions, however.

Voting is often used to illustrate unfairness. According to Rab, UK, for example, citizens are allowed to add a certain name on the ballot by paying corresponding amount of money. I agree that this is a richmen's game because their financial power directly means political power. In the U.S. it does not work this easily. Not only the candidate has to convince certain regions for approval to put his or her name, but also people in U.S. have no interests with the 3rd challenger. However in the U.S., there is a voting limitation not only for ages, but also for race, nationality and gender until recently. Voting shows anti-democracy. The simulation of Odious Debt made me easy to understand what it is. It was funny because I ended up receiving Maki's laptop but that might happen in the real situation. This is basically a flow of wealth from the poor to the rich, so rich companies or countries can exploit resources and the poor end up not having anything original.

I had been doubting if the U.S. is really democratic. Representative democracy is an extremely contradicting term. The voting system in the states, Electoral College, is basically a number game. Some states, such as Texas or California, own much more votes than any others so the candidate who wins these two states already gain more than 100 electoral votes out of 332. I am so bad at memorizing political stuff and cannot find it on the internet but I think there was one election in the past in which the candidate who lost was actually winning in terms of total individual votes by the citizens. In this case, the term representative democracy even loses its credibility as a form of democracy.