the US is not a democracy. it has never been a democracy. and I don't mean in the bullshit pedantic wonk "oh it's a republic" sense, I mean actually in the sense of people's votes mattering equally: electoral college, gerrymandering, voter suppression (targeting poor/minorities)

and, most significantly, the legality of buying elections, politicians, judges, everyone, also known as corruption. the entire political system is captured and controlled by corporate interests, as chomsky points out

this truism is often intentionally obscured, forgotten, or conveniently put somewhere so in the back of one's mind that it's barely there anymore. but it's the critical fact, for what it means is that the state is illegitimate, as is its monopoly on violence

any state violence used against democratic movements is the action of a tyrannical force to maintain its own nature as such, whereas democratic opposition to it, of any kind, is legitimate purely on those grounds alone

this is blasphemous to both conservative and liberal ideologues, who are among those who intentionally obfuscate the fact that the US is not democratic, because admitting this truism means pulling the rug from under the feet of the ruling class, and, by extension, themselves

I'll end with this: lenin in 1917's "state and revolution" (also called his "anarchist moment"), and that famous 2014 princeton study demonstrating that the US is not a democracy but an oligarchy

here's another fact: the incumbency reelection rate for congress, for which the disapproval ratings are staggering, are typically above 90%. for the house it was 91% in 2018 and 96.7% (!) in 2016. as chomsky notes, whatever is happening here, it's not democracy

for how the prison-industrial complex functions as a disenfranchisement tool see this thread and the piece it quotes from https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1302676306803515392