such a system, sort of.
You will often hear Republicans yelling about how we are not a Democracy, but rather a Republic.
In the simplest terms that even I can understand, we do not have "a" Democracy, we have hundreds of small ones. We have state, county, city, even township level Democratic elections. Some of those will operate as a collective for national elections, the thing we call the EC.
So while I still consider that to be Democracy by it's nature and design, many will argue it is not a Democracy because it is not a true Democracy by definition. I find this to be just hair-splitting. The end result with the EC is that we DO have that protection built-in. The guys who designed this were some incredibly smart people, and I'm still in awe that they were able to predict as many issues as they did. Most of it was based on governmental failures that they had witnessed or were otherwise documented, and they considered it all.
In my personal opinion, the current noise is mostly about misunderstood political freak-out gossip. The guardrails that everyone is claiming do not exist, absolutely do exist. That is The Constitution. For example, in the center of all of the 2020 noise and chaos in certification and inauguration month, in the end, did you notice that Trump did leave when he was required to? He acted like a spoiled child, but he left and things moved forward as designed.
There are two other branches that can and will be used to keep these people in line. It's not always going to go the way we want, and in the time frame we want, but the system will correct itself by those leveraging the tools afforded to them. So while we consider the result of this election to be flawed, 52-53%(?) of the country does not. That is not a failure of the system, it is the will of the voters regardless of how much we (the other 48%) may disagree. It just sucks.
Having said that, the system has another built-in mechanism for when people DO make poor choices, and that is the revolving nature of our leadership. Everyone gets to re-evaluate and vote again in 4 years, and we will.
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