In the simplest sense of the word, none of that is needed. Athens had such a democracy, where a majority of people made a decision so. You are putting more stipulations on the word than are strictly necessary, hence why I said the democracy examples you gave would not be great places to live in.
You referring back to only Athens when we have had several centuries of political history and progress, is embarrassing.
The Constitution of the USA was especially a model of its kind. Until we realized its implementation went lacking from true believers, for what we can witness since January 20th.
Check also the constitutions of modern democracies throughout the world.
Something that depends only on the rule of the majority, without constitutional guarantees of the respect of the law, without a self-defense system against abuse of power is a relic of the past prototype democracies.
> You referring back to only Athens when we have had several centuries of political history and progress, is embarrassing.
> The Constitution of the USA was especially a model of its kind.
Then how is it that the US in its inception, like Greece, did not allow neither women nor all men (slaves) to vote? Clearly not much progress had been made by then. Much of the progress was made in the Civil rights movement, for example. That was last century, not "several centuries".
To be clear, summarizing my other replies to your comments, I am 100% with you that all of the things you mention are good things, and that they should be defended. But your redefinition of democracy (and American democracy in particular) doesn't parse and seems to be the product of historical revisionism.
I may have been more fussy than revisionist then, sorry for that.
What I was (unexplicitly enough) implying is that I don’t see how a stable democracy, going forward, could work, without implementing those improvements mechanisms that emerged through time and experience.
A pure Athenian democracy today at the scale of a country, with the complexities of the day, wouldn’t hold for more than a few years, at best.
You asked whether something is a democracy, not a modern democracy, hence why I gave the examples I did. And even in a modern one, I am unconvinced that just because there are features like you mention for modern democracies does not make them not actual democracies. They very well can be, by the dictionary definition of the word, just not free ones.
Also, no need for the ad hominems, there is no reason to accuse me of not understanding something or it being "embarrassing," that is not helpful to any sort of conversation.
I get your point. But calling your argument embarrassing is not an ad hominem.
I’m not saying you do not understand. I am implying that in a discussion in the XXIth century about the concept of democracy as it has evolved in both the littérature and the history, and has been demonstrably stable and efficient, “democracy” is understood in the modern acception, and especially here, in the context of the USA Constitution - and there it has the requirements I laid out.
Turning any country today into an antique democracy rule would make no sense, unless you accept a peculiar instability. We have experienced, in many nations, how to adjust and balance how a democracy can work and self-sustain. However, we also still experience how fragile they stay.
And the disappointment is abysmal. Hence, perhaps, me being a tad tense in my words, for that I present my apologies.
