anymore

never was. from slavery to Jim Crow to modern debt peonage

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich— that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”— supposedly petty— details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,— we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.

—Lenin, State and Revolution, 1917

In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slaveowners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that “they cannot be bothered with democracy”, “cannot be bothered with politics”; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.

—Lenin, State and Revolution, 1917

all states are class dictatorships, so it has only ever been a democracy for the bourgeois class since it has always been a bourgeois dictatorship.

https://redsails.org/concessions/

https://redsails.org/xi-on-democracy/

The US has been a full-blown military junta since 1963

Was it ever?

Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory represented the highest popular vote turnout in American history, receiving 81 million votes with “66% voter turnout”. Considering that the population in 2020 was 331 million (81÷331), only 24% of Americans, less than a quarter, voted for Joe Biden. Using this same formula Trump’s recent election was made possibly by only receiving votes from 22% of the population. Consistently, fewer than half of all Americans participate in the Democratic process