I hate to break it to you, but your democracy sucks

Indi Samarajiva

Sep 21, 2020·4 min read

America isn’t a democracy, it’s a demented game of Monopoly. Your President didn’t win the vote, he just held the right properties. Community Chest is literally a coffin in the Supreme Court. More to the point, all of your resources are being taken by a small elite, while most people can barely pass GO. This isn’t a democracy. It’s a twisted game.

Americans like to think they’re a beacon of democracy, but they’ve been smoking their own propaganda too long. America is not a democracy, and no actual democracy functions like this. Because it’s non-functional.

I say America’s not a democracy because 56 countries had universal suffrage before America, including my shithole, Sri Lanka. When America was founded only 6% of people could vote and, guess what, rich white men with property are still running things. Even with the franchise, Americans barely vote, and who can blame them. The system is structurally rigged. Again, you don’t need to win the vote to be President. Land has more representation than human beings. This is not a functional democracy. It’s Monopoly. Kleptocracy, to be exact.

To ‘win’ at American democracy you fundamentally need to control land. If you win the legislature in a state, you can literally draw squiggly maps around your opponents to make their votes not count. This is called gerrymandering. You can also simply remove voting booths in places that won’t vote for you, or destroy your own post office, or make classes of people pay to vote. This is just voter suppression, and Republicans are perfecting it. To say this is an anomaly would be wrong, because again, America was late to universal suffrage. Violent voter suppression was the law until recently.

The system itself is rigged against human beings in general. America has this weird thing called a Senate, where Wyoming (600,000 people) has the same representation as California (40 million). Other countries don’t do this because it’s dumb. America also has colonies where people are taxed without representation at all. That’s what Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and — inexplicably — Washington DC are. America doesn’t call them colonies, but they also don’t call war war, or torture torture. It is what it is.

Then the Electoral College. This system designed to give enslaving bastards credit for the amount of people they enslaved (giving Jefferson the White House in 1801) is still working as intended. Disenfranchising a geological crescent of black voters in the south and tossing out the votes of many cities in a winner-takes-all system that also makes election night insane. The system is designed so that people don’t count and that land (and land-owning white people) do. It’s undemocratic by design.

Finally, America has a Supreme Court which you’re supposed to sit on until you die, which is literally morbid. Human death then becomes a bonus card for the ruling party. And the Republican Senate won’t even let Democrats play it. They just cheat to win.

I mean, what is this? Yes it looks like a democracy, but Monopoly looks like real estate. They’re both games, except one is at least fun (and doesn’t impoverish you or drone your neighbors). The American game of governance has been rigged for hundreds of years and guess what, it still is. There are a bunch of arbitrary rules, territories, and then bonus cards that give you power. This is not a system any rational human would design. Your founders were dumbasses.

If I may give you an example of a rational system, look at the older democracy of Sri Lanka.

First off, every citizen can vote, and most do. Our votes also count, because we have proportional representation. If you win 30% of the votes at a district Even if you get below the threshold there, you can get a bonus seat at the a national level. It’s not winner take all, and the winners certainly can’t redraw districts, because why on Earth would you do that?

Sri Lanka doesn’t have a separate legislative body for land, because why? Our Supreme Court judges retire rather than becoming senile on the bench, and coffins are not greeted with such glee. Finally, to become President you need to win the most votes, because uhhh, obviously?

Sri Lanka is super messed up in other ways — we have a Minister for Coconuts for example, and one MP is demanding a Ministry for Monkeys — but we are not as structurally damaged as the United States. The US is both a younger and worse democracy than Sri Lanka. Our democracy is flawed, but at the least, it’s not a game. Most of the world is like this. And no, we do not look up to you.

I mean, I hate to break it to you, but your democracy sucks. In all honesty, your media should stop covering America as a democracy at all. Seriously, look at yourselves. If you were depending on an 87-year-old cancer patient to prop up your system of government, congratulations, it was already dead. American democracy is a game. The Republicans are simply playing it, and they’re definitely playing you.