Real democracy is voter equality. We do not have that. Real democracy is what the nations in top of the list of Happy Nations have. They have a system of Full Representation. All individuals are empowered and when they vote, their vote transfers their power into an actual person of their own choosing. We do not have that.
We are not a nation based on individuals. Rather, we got divided into districts and then we were declared each other's equals. The collective makes the decision for you. That means the system setup bit us in the butt even before we voted. We were had the second we decided to participate. We don't have a system of representation. We have a system of winners only.
Someone else said it so much better than I can:
"Two very different ideas are usually confounded under the name democracy. The pure idea of democracy, according to its definition, is the government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented. Democracy as commonly conceived and hitherto practiced is the government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people, exclusively represented. The former is synonymous with the equality of all citizens; the latter, strangely confounded with it, is a government of privilege, in favor of the numerical majority, who alone possess practically any voice in the State. This is the inevitable consequence of the manner in which the votes are now taken, to the complete disfranchisement of minorities."
—John Stuart Mill, Representative Government, 1861
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So, we live in a voting system that is basically medieval.
Did you know that Thomas Jefferson is the first to have ever devised a voting system of Full Representation?
He was Enlightened (in this respect, that is) and gave us the voting system that all nations in top of the list of Happy Nations use.
Why aren't we using it? He was part of the Founding Fathers, not?
It's actually fascinating. The Founding Fathers only restricted our voting for the Federal level. They did not restrict our votings systems for State and local levels, and when you read the Ninth, Tenth and Fourteenth Amendments, then you know that this combination of Amendments tell very loud and clear that we should have Full Representation in place for State and local levels.
Only the Federal level received that winner-take-all system, so we would have a concentration of powers at that level to make the nation strong when faced with foreign enemies and extreme internal conflicts.
What happened was that the States snubbed their noses at the US Constitution's words and ignored what they were told to do. Instead, they put restricted voting in place as well, so they could concentrate their powers at the State levels, too.
Insult to injury, they even made it verboten to have free elections at city and county level. They simply did not want anyone to know how good and honest an actual democracy feels like. They wanted to make sure no one got any experience with Thomas Jefferson's voting system, because that would stop the concentration of powers.
So, when you think that the two-party system got written into the US Constitution somehow, then that is incorrect. It was the States that pushed their own elections and city and county elections in that category that undermines what the Founding Fathers had in mind for us.
The pursuit of happiness is undermined when an election system segregates us in districts first and only then makes us all equal.
The majority of the voters get their winner, and then next another round of majority is found with the majority of the winners making the decisions. Like .6 x .6 = .36, we then have minority rule (no, not the usual minority, this is the elitist minority).
In Full Representation, the majority decision is always supported by the majority of the voters. That is a real democracy. The majority of voters decides. We do not have that.
Join Local Revolutions grassroots organization if you want to change our nation to what the Founding Fathers had in mind.