How can (USA) consider ourselves a Democratic Nation and only have the choice of 2, yes 2, old men over 80 to vote for in our coming Presidential Election???? I'm confounded by this! Both of them are crazy and loosing their minds. Is this for real??? How does that make USA the BEST country on earth? I want choices in Presidential leadership; as a USA citizen and voter am not being offered any! What happened to all the way up to 4 years ago there was a panel of Republicans and Democrates that would go debate for being elected? The other contenders dropped out bc they didnt have enough money to stay in the race? WTF? So only wealthy men with lots of private funds/ backing can be President of The United States of America? The press just keeps pushing Biden and Trump forward without mention of any one else that are potential choices. That's some serious BRAIN WASHING! Never mind the very qualified young men and women who could actually get this country on a good path again without all the SERIOUS CORRUPTION. Stop this weakening state of our Country before its too late! STOP it NOW! This is a very scary time. Who we email, who do we write, what do we do. Are we really this helpless, are the People of the United States of America really this powerless, confused, unconcerned, ignorant, blind, convinced that no matter what

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The essence of democracy

Lets start with something easier, like the essence of autocracy. Well, everyone knows that it is minority benefits the most or minority violence.

Then what is the essence of democracy?

Is it the majority that benefits the most? no

Is it majority violence? no

Minority incites majority violence or, more simply, minority violence.

Therefore, as we see, the essence of democracy is the same as the essence of autocracy, or maybe you can say that democracy is a kind of autocracy. You might say that if it is, why do we still need democracy? It's clear that if we use that system of democracy, we can bring more sense of participation for people. Therefore, we can know that in the future, it's clear that more and more countries will use the system of democracy, but not for bringing the rights of the people; it's for more sense of participation. Democracy is a better kind of autocracy.

I seen many people saying democracy is bad but i have reasons why is good and based its not perfect but its okay

The first and most noted strand of radical democracy is the agonistic perspective, which is associated with the work of Laclau and Mouffe. Radical democracy was articulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, written in 1985. Laclau and Mouffe claim that liberal democracy and deliberative democracy, in their attempts to build consensus, oppress differing opinions, races, classes, genders, and worldviews. By building democracy around difference and dissent, oppressive power relations existing in societies are able to come to the forefront so that they can be challenged. Rather than attempting to wholly eliminate conflict in the political, which agonistic pluralists maintain is conceptually impossible, agonistic pluralism is the model of democracy which attempts to mobilize these passions "towards the promotion of democratic designs." Agonistic pluralists emphasize how the construction of group identities relies on a continuous "other"; this us/them conflict is inherent to politics, and it should be the role of democratic institutions to mitigate such conflicts. The role of agonistic pluralism is to transform antagonistic sentiments into agonistic ones. As Mouffe writes, "this presupposes that the 'other' is no longer seen as an enemy to be destroyed, but somebody with whose ideas we are going to struggle but whose right to defend those ideas we will not put into question." Agonistic pluralists view this conversion of "enemies" into "adversaries" as being fundamental to well-functioning democracies and the only way to properly limit domination.

How would the institutions of a radical agonistic democracy structurally differ from a conventional one? The bit about respecting other's viewpoints seems more like a personal idea than a political one. Does anyone have any thoughts?