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The tests for the absence of democracy are quite simpler than for the existence of it. The absence of democracy can be gauged by two tests: Is there a government that is elected and does the government care about its citizens, their welfare and their opinion? The American government is definitely elected. But that is where it gets tricky and very interesting.
The one test of a democracy, having an elected government, is basically the ballot. And that is the thing almost always misunderstood as proof of the existence of democracy. The existence of ballot does not necessarily guarantee the existence of democracy as well. That proof comes from the other test: whether or not the elected government cares about the people and the vox populi.
If America were not a democracy but disguised as one, it would hold an election where a candidate would be elected by the people but once elected, the candidate would turn his back on the people and work for the interests of concentrated wealth in the American society such as the Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil and so forth.
If America were not a democracy, it would allow money to play a major role in elections as well as dictating the policymaking by the elected politicians. It would allow money to not only be more powerful than the speech of the people but also be legalised in landmark Supreme Court rulings such as Citizens United of 2010. It would dictate that corporations be treated as human beings with their enormous cash as their free speech.
When a politician needs to run for office, he or she has to be able to reach the audience through aggressive campaigns. Those campaigns require cash. The corporations and foreign countries such as Israel, represented by their respective lobbies, are willing to throw that cash at the candidate thereby creating a vicious cycle where the elected politician ignores the welfare of the people and obeys the paymasters who actually paid for this servitude. The result is that while the politician in public office is elected, he doesn’t work for those that elected him. The few rich win against the many poor.
If America were not a democracy, it would allow elected politicians to don the military uniform of a foreign military (IDF) while working in the American public office to which they were elected. If America were not a democracy, the elected politicians would advocate to safeguard the interests of a foreign country (Israel) instead of the interests of America and the American people. Elected politicians would starve its own citizens including veterans here in America, would continue to keep the American healthcare nightmarishly expensive, but would work relentlessly hard to ensure that some foreign country (Israel) is given enough money so that they could have free healthcare for all its citizens.
If America were not a democracy, it would allow its own soldiers to be removed from duty based on their online critical posts about a foreign country (Israel). It would pay billions of dollars and make media noise to bring back Israeli citizens held captive by Hamas but at the same time kill its own citizens in the streets just because those citizens would exercise their right to free speech (Alex Pretti and Renee Good). If America were not a democracy, it would tolerate critique of America but would show zero tolerance to critique of a foreign country (Israel). It would not equate critique of America with hatred of Christians or anyone else but would equate critique of Israel with hatred of Jews.
If America were not a democracy, it would design its election process by injecting in it the existence of a mechanism where popular vote wouldn’t determine the election outcome but rather some indirect mechanism. And that mechanism would be thought up by the fathers of the constitution for the sake of controlling what they called the “excess of democracy”.
I can keep going but can you imagine, if America were not a democracy?
