You’d think a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players, would have some mechanism that would prevent itself from throwing down it’s key ideology.
Is it really that the president is all that decides about the future of democracy itself? Is 53 out of 100 senate seats really enough to make country fall into authoritarian regime? Is the army really not constitutionally obliged to step in and save the day?
I’d never think that, of all places, American democracy would be the most volatile.
Sometimes a voting population needs to be protected from the consequences of their vote, right? A good chunk of the German voting population in the 1930 voted the NSDAP and Hitler into power, and we can agree that it would have been for the best if that party and its leadership had been deposed ASAP. Now, the US isn’t quite that far down the slide yet, but they’re certainly slipping, and the worst part is that the checks and balances that are supposed to keep a president in line are also failing. Not to be alarmist, but we’re in for a wild ride.
Your first question is pretty philosophical. All I can say, is that most representative governments place a huge emphasis on giving the people the power to write their own collective destiny.
A military takeover based on the desires of a minority of citizens would violate that principal. I don’t think any reasonable person can call it saving democracy.
A functional democracy is not a dictatorship of the majority, and people from the US love making this mistake. It is true that the president gets elected by a majority vote… but this person now represents everyone, including the minority that opposes them. They do not have the right to sink the ship and kill everyone because the majority thinks that’s a good idea.
It is natural that their government will make decisions aligned with their voters (in theory) but they shouldn’t be allowed to actively undermine the rights of everyone else.
No matter how inflated your perception of your “flawless” constitution and democracy is, this is something many countries understand pretty well and yours struggles with.
Yes, but it is a question that is pertinent to the situation. What do you do if a population elects someone that starts undermining their democracy? I understand that forcibly taking that person’s power away is in itself anti-democratic, but if their actions are even worse, then it would be justified right? A smaller anti-democratic act to stop the larger anti-democratic effort where they’re dismantling the democratic system that put them in power.