Comment on [deleted]
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 5 weeks agoThe US has never been a democracy, they’re just being more straightforward about it recently
Comment on [deleted]
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 5 weeks agoThe US has never been a democracy, they’re just being more straightforward about it recently
Randelung@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
People keep commenting this without context and it’s driving me mad. It’s factually wrong, so at least tell us what you mean in the figurative sense.
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
It is not factually wrong, even if you argue that a representative republic can be democratic it’s an easily verifiable historical fact that ours never was. At every point in US history there have been groups of people who were deliberately and methodically disenfranchised from any representation while still being subject to US rule. If being told that hurts your feelings it just means the propaganda worked, try being less gullible.
Randelung@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
No, this is just the first time anyone actually invested more than the one sentence into an explanation. Can you give me a little more to look into? I genuinely have no idea what you’re referring to.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
African Americans were supposed to be given the right to vote after abolition.
There was a brief period of time during Reconstruction where that happened. However, many states came up with complicated contrivances to make it impossible to vote - poll taxes, “literacy tests,” etc. Effectively, it was a right solely on paper until LBJ in the 60s. Conservatives throwing a massive fit about this is why we have the insane fascistic Right we do right now - they were pro public education until Black kids got to go to the same kids as white kids.
Women weren’t guaranteed the right to vote until 1920. Conservatives today are trying to revoke the 19th amendment and undo that.
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
If I had to guess I’d say that nobody has bothered responding to you with more than a single sentence because you clearly have internet access and could easily read about the history of US voting rights and the current state of US voting suppression, and that you therefore have no excuse for weighing in in a topic about which you clearly don’t know much, but that is just an educated guess.
Originally voting rights in the US were only extended to white male christian land-owners. Over the course of the next two centuries they gradually relaxed the property ownership requirements, then eventually got around to granting voting rights to non-white men and then women. In theory this would make the US currently a democracy, but in practice they suppress voting access in predominantly non-white districts through gerrymandering, and elected officials routinely act against the wishes of their constituents in favor of pleasing their billionaire donors. We transitioned from a fundamentally racist and classist republic to an oligarchy.