The constant reference to "democracy" as the thing that makes us good and them bad is so frustrating to me because we are _barely_ a democracy.

We are ruled by a two-party state. Nobody else has any power or any chance at power. How is that really much better than a one-party state?

Actually, these two parties are so fundamentally ANTI-democracy that they are currently having a very public battle of "who can gerrymander the most" across multiple states.

Our "elections" are barely more useful than the "elections" in one-party states like North Korea and China. We have an entire, completely legal industry based around corporate interests telling politicians what to do (it's called "lobbying"). Our campaign finance laws allow corporations to donate infinite amounts of money to politician's campaigns through SuperPACs. People are given two choices to vote for, and those choices are based on who licks corporation boots the best, and who follows the party line the best. Because we're definitely a Democracy.

There are no laws against bribing supreme court justices, and in fact there is compelling evidence that multiple supreme court justices have regularly taken bribes - and nothing is done about this. And yet we're a good, democratic country, right? And other countries are evil and corrupt.

The current president is stretching executive power as far as it possibly can go. He has a secret police of thugs abducting people around the country. Many of them - completely innocent people - have been sent to a brutal concentration camp in El Salvador. But I suppose a gay hairdresser with a green card deserves that, right? Because we're a democracy, not like those other evil countries.

He's also threatining to invade Greenland, and has already kidnapped the president of Venezuela - but that's ok, because we're Good. Other countries who invade people are Bad though.

And now that same president is trying to nationalize elections, clearly to make them even less fair than they already are, and nobody's stopping him. How is that democratic exactly?

Sorry for the long rant, but it just majorly pisses me off when I read something like this that constantly refers to the US as a good democracy and other countries as evil autocracies.

We are not that much better than them. We suck. It's bad for us to use mass surveillance on their citizens, just like it's bad to use mass surveillance on our citizens.

And yet we will do it anyways, just like China will do it anyways, because we are ultimately not that different.