The Importance Of Democracy In The United States

The term democracy, as defined by dictionary.com, is a “government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.” The United States is a democracy, according to official sources, but is it really a true democracy anymore? No. In fact, as time has gone on, the United States has shown a decline in democratic traits. The USA does not have all of its citizens actively voting, it has a charter which holds most of the power, and worst of all, it makes executive decisions without any consent of the people. The first major reason that the USA is not a democracy is that not everyone votes, therefore the “elected” government officials are not truly elected by popular vote among everyone living in the country, but only by those few who vote. According to a poll on the huffington post, the amount of people voting has begun to decline yet again. The data was collected years 1948 to 2012, the year of Obama’s reelection. The highest year for voting was the 1960 election, with 64% of the eligible voting population actually voting. As of 2012, the voting rate had gone down to about 58% of the population. These are astounding numbers especially considering …show more content…
In a republic, like the USA, the charter can restrict what people say and they must abide by it. For instance, in a democracy, the majority might be men, and the minority is women. If a vote was to be had about what is the better sex and which gender deserves to be able to vote in the future, then clearly all males would vote for males, and all females would vote for females. This would mean that all men would get to vote, and since the females are the minority, they would be under-represented and lose. In a republic, such as the USA, our constitution would protect the right to vote for women and cannot be changed so