Lexicus
Deity
We still have a pretty strong infrastructure of participatory democracy at the local level. This varies place to place, of course, but is true in most of the US. We still have regulations enacted with broad public support that curb the unaccountable power of capitalists and other authority figures. We have labor protections and a trade union movement numbering in the millions. We have a vibrant civil society with many democratic organizations that act as countervailing forces against various forms of unaccountable power. We have also, to a very large degree, freed people from the confines of authoritarian social structures such as the patriarchal family unit.
Now...
This is a perplexing statement. Electing officials is, all other things equal, clearly more democratic than the alternative of not electing them. To me it seems fairly obvious that every other way of appointing representatives is less democratic than electing them. This may simply speak to my own limited imagination though. Can you give me an example of a method of choosing representatives that is more democratic than electing them? Or is this some sort of weird segue into arguing that anything except participatory democracy is not "real" democracy?
