US Election – what exactly is “democratic” about it?

US Election – what exactly is “democratic” about it?

Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama come across as talented, intelligent, energetic, and good people. I do not doubt that they are all capable of running the top administrative and executive job in the United States of America. But voting on people is *not* what democracy is about.

Certainly, a procedure in which a popularity contest is “won” by whoever gets the most “votes” is technically “democratic”. But the technique of voting “democratically” is *not* what democracy is truly about.

True, real, democracy is *policies*, not *people*. By all means let us elect our administrators by democratic techniques, but that is merely one very limited aspect of democratic governance. Only when the people govern themselves can democratic governance be recognised to exist. A society is fully, 100% democratic only when all the rules by which its members wish to live have been ratified by those same members applying the basic techniques of democracy to all of those rules.

The US presidential election has nothing to do with democratic governance; it is only a limited exercise of a democratic technique with the sole objective of determining which candidate is the most “popular”. Real democracy will have to wait until the United States constitution is re-written by the people for the people and controlled only by the people.