How Democratic Is America

How Democratic Is America?

To answer the question, “How democratic is the United States of America,” you would have to first know the interpretation of a democracy and as I was doing my research, democracy can be interpreted in numerous amounts of ways. Depending on how one would interpret democracy, the answers can vary from the United States of America is the best and most effective democracy in the world to the United States of America is in denial about its democracy and is the farthest thing away from even being an existing democracy. As Howard Zinn simply states, “Our definition is crucial. This becomes clear if we note how relatively easy the answer to our question is when we define democracy as a set of formal institutions and let it go at that. If we describe as "democratic" a country that has a representative system of government, with universal suffrage, a bill of rights, and party competition for office, it becomes easy to answer the question "how" with the enthusiastic reply, "Very!"…” But then Zinn goes on to say if we were to interpret democracy in a brand new light, the United States of America can be seen as the farthest thing away from being a democracy. Sidney Hook on the other hand rebuttals Zinn’s statement by saying, “First of all, he confuses democracy as a political process with democracy as a political product or state of welfare; democracy as a "free society" with democracy as a "good society," where good is defined in terms of equality or justice (or both) or some other constellation of values.” So as you can see there are drastic differences. So is the United States of America a democracy or not? This paper will show how through the reading and my interviews what my views are on whether or not the United States of America is a democracy or not.

So Zinn had a list of criteria on a true democracy, and they were listed as follows:

1. To what extent can various people in the society participate in those decisions which affect...