When people like anencephalic fascist Mike Lee say "America is not a democracy," they are wrong.

Even the brilliant @JYSexton blew this a little bit in his latest podcast ep, so I'm going to do a little thread about it here.

To say that America is not a democracy is like saying a particular banana is not "banana." In tiny, sophistic, useless sense it's true.

"Banana" is an abstract idea. "Banana" does not exist in the physical world. But bananas do exist, each unique and different.

Similarly, "democracy" is the abstract principle of self-rule by the people.

"Democracy," or "rank democracy" as illiterate Mike Lee put it, does not exist in the world, but particular versions of it do, and they are all democracies.

So, just like "that banana" is a banana, "representative democracy" is a democracy.

I assume that by "rank democracy," inarticulate Republican (redundant) Mike Lee meant something like "1 person, 1 vote, every single question decided by majority-wins referenda democracy."

Such a system is completely unworkable outside the scope of a book club and so has never been implemented at large scale.

And thus our founders, for better or for worse, designed our particular jalopy of representative democracy.

Their agendas were broader than "how can we make self-rule workable in this era of horse-borne mail and outhouses?"

They wanted to apportion power mostly to people like themselves for their own advantage at the same time as they wanted to implement some Enlightenment principles.

The original Constitution is morally and practically deficient in many ways, and has thus had to be tweaked many times, like that time we freed the slaves and that time we gave women the vote.

Little stuff like that.

The semi-legal rise of conservative minority fascism on the right proves it needs to be tweaked a lot more to block that sh1t.

My great uncle didn't get his leg blown off during the Normandy invasion to allow that sh!t here.

END https://twitter.com/airbagmoments/status/1301957864655912962?s=20