Can Somebody Point Me To The Time This Country.....

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10. Maybe first point to the time we had an actual democracy?

We've claimed to have had a democracy since 1776, but at best it was a representative democracy where people get to choose leaders, but where the people don't truly wield the power.

Certainly it's not very reasonable to call it a democracy before slavery was abolished and women had the vote. Even then, democracy with unfair denial of rights and freedoms to blacks, among others, can't be a true democracy, so at best we're up to the 1960s.

After the voting age was lowered, at least we finally had voting for all adults citizens. But we still had and still have done very anti-democratic features in our government, from gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression, the electoral college, money in politics (including from foreign source), etc.

Frankly, it's very, very difficult for we the people to get our way unless our way happens to align with the interests of the ruling class. So it was never much of a democracy, sorry to say.

But yeah, it wa certainly closer to a democracy than it is today, and about 200 years of progress began yo unravel with a few things:

Lee Atwater's partisan, personal, immoral dirty tricks and attacks
Newt Gingrich's hyper-partisanship
Ronald Reagan's glorification of greed, launching of massive concentration of wealth, and killing off the notion of civic duty
Rush Limbaugh and the Koch brothers' takeover of AM radio, launching the major right-wing propaganda machine that later added foxnews and others.
The very undemocratic stealing of the presidency in 2000
The opening of floodgates for money in politics.
And the steady corruption of institutions, notably the MSM normalizing hate, right-wing extremism, lies, etc.

Into this cesspool stepped Donnie. It misses the point to think he himself made anything worse. With such a massive right-win effort into dismantling whatever democracy we had, someone like Donnie being at the top was inevitable. That said, he had certainly furthered the corruption of our institutions and our government.

Not sure who said it, or if I have the quote quite right, but someone once said of America, democracy sounds like a great idea; perhaps we should try it sometime.