The United States- Truly a Democracy?
We like to think of ourselves as a nation that is the prime example of democracy, but we love the idea that we are the embodiment of the idea itself. The problem is, how can you be the example of something you don’t practice? We are we a democracy, but why? That’s right, because the government tells us we are, time and time again. In a true democracy, it is the people who hold the power and get to choose who is in control, but such is not the case in our country. The United States is not a democracy because of factors of gerrymandering, the flaws of the electoral college, the intent of our founding fathers for us to be a republic, and our history of our racism as a nation.
In the United States, each state is given a specific number of representatives based on the state’s population. Obviously the larger
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Constitution was in 1787, they had no purpose of establishing a democracy, but every intention of starting a republic. In a republic, the voters do not directly govern themselves, rather they select representatives to govern them. In a democracy, all people get a say, and to be honest, the founding fathers didn’t want that. This was back in a time when slaves could not vote, women could not vote, and men with no property could not vote. The founders feared that if all the public got a say, passions would take place of policy, and put the whole system in disarray (Friedman 2016). You see examples of this every day in our country, because everyone and anyone with a brain has an opinion, so nothing gets accomplished anymore. In the republic they created, the voters were few. They were men interceding among public opinion and national policy. They only chose men with wealth and property, because they had lots to lose if they made mistakes. So how we call ourselves a democracy, when our roots trace all the way back to a republic that our founding fathers meant for us to