I personally think that democracy should be measured by how much influence the population in general has on public matters rather than whether or not majority rule exists. The U.S isn't a democracy because the people don't have any influence on public policy, not merely because the Head of State isn't voted on by a majority national vote.
Economic elites and special interest groups, on the other-hand, do influence public policy.
A more democratic system implies that public matters are managed by each and every person.
The anarchist and socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon categorized "ideal" or "a priori" forms of government as below, and suggested that "empirical" or "defacto" governments (aristocracy, ocholocracy, etc) were a sort of mixture of these a priori forms that exist in the real world as different people pursue different ideals. Historically the dominant "a priori" form of the U.S was democracy, "rule of all by each" even if the de-facto form was a plutocratic kritarchy. The only difference now is that large swaths of the population have discarded the pretense of democracy, which is a state of affairs that hasn't existed in the U.S since the first party system ended with the collapse of the explicitly anti-democratic Federalist Party, which by the way is the group that founded all of the un-democratic institutions of the U.S (senate distribution, electoral college, absolute judicial review by the supreme court, etc.) Even slave holding confederate states pretended to value democracy as they suppressed pro-unionist majorities.
From P.J Proudhon's The Federative Principle and The Need To Reconstitute the Party of Revolution
Regime of authority
-
- A) Government of all by one -- monarchy or patriarchy;
- a) Government of all by all -- panarchy or communism.
The essential feature of this regime, in both its varieties, is the non-division of power.
Regime of liberty
-
- B) Government of all by each -- democracy;
- b) Government of each by each -- an-archy or self-government.
The essential feature of this regime, in both its varieties, is the division of power.
