@Remittancegirl@mstdn.social @cstross@wandering.shop If the government reacting to people in the streets is what democracy is, then my country, Syria, was a democracy during the Assad regime. Heck, even Assad's government did /some/ positive things in reaction to people in the streets (and many other bad things). I'm more inclined to the definition of democracy as having a path for the governed to completely change and choose the people governing them, with the core aim of influencing the policy enacted on the governed, without having to resort to violent destructive revolution. And I think democracy is probably a spectrum and not a binary, and the "ideal" place on the spectrum is neither of its two far ends. A country where you can change a few faces without being able to change enough of the government to enact fundamental policy change is less of a democracy than a country where people can affect fundamental policy. At some point, the changing of faces without a change of policy may result in violent revolt anyway, because people will revolt against the system of policy itself not the random current-day faces plastered all over it. When people take to the streets, and there is a reaction, that is a sign of fear. The government fears the people. A positive sign perhaps, but not democracy in of itself. The system has to accommodate the changing wishes of the people, and not just pretend to do so by rotating the faces in charge. I think Americans who claim the US is not a democracy are taking that perspective on what democracy really means; if I, and everyone around me, believe something is ought to be a certain way, but the government is constantly doing the opposite, then it must not be a democracy I'm living in. Some part of this is probably that people are more and more isolated in same-think bubbles, where digital echo chambers make them feel like every good-hearted sane reasonable person is on their side, and perhaps another part of it, if I may judge as an outsider, seems to be an actual deterioration in the governance and administration of the US system, where people's wills are affecting policy less and less, even in cases where most sides agree on a major thing, especially when there is some "other side" that is usually some mega corporation. Fun fact, in Syria, the most popular chant on the streets during demonstrations was not "Down with Assad" as most western media seemed to impress at the time, but something that translates more literally to "The people wills that this system falls".