The United States Is Not a Democracy.

[twopass]

Stop Telling Students That It Is.

https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-kne ... democracy/

[Montana St Alum]

A democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
If the sheep gets to do the counting, fine. If not.....

People are generally rational.
People generally don't want to cheat.
But above all, people are interested in self preservation.

If you can convince the majority that they are in a democracy, then the easy next step is to convince them that they are the sheep.
At that point, self preservation causes a very rational response. Self preservation results in people thinking, "well, I don't like cheating, but I like being eaten by wolves even less"!

Then all you need to do is identify the wolves.
You just need to make sure they can't speak out in defense of themselves. A bit of political correctness, and that's taken care of.

[twopass]

Historical analysis shows that long spells of equitable prosperity and internal peace are succeeded by protracted periods of inequity, increasing misery, and political instability. These crisis periods—“Ages of Discord”—tend to share characteristic features, identifiable in many societies throughout history. Modern Americans, for example, may be disconcerted to learn that the US right now has much in common with the Antebellum 1850s and, even more surprisingly, with ancien régime France on the eve of the French Revolution. Can it really be true that our troubled age is nothing new, and that it arises periodically for similar underlying reasons? It can. Ages of Discord marshals a cohesive theory and detailed historical data to show that this is, indeed, the case. The book takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through American history, from the Era of Good Feelings of the 1820s to our first Age of Discord, which culminated in the American Civil War, to post-WW2 prosperity and, finally, to our present, second Age of Discord.

http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/