No Stupid Questions

that would be necessary, not sufficient condition.

No serious political scientist claims democracy is a matter of ideology or “who feels represented.” There is broad cross-national agreement on procedural criteria: competitive elections, universal suffrage, freedom of association and expression, independent courts, civilian control of the military, and peaceful transfer of power. Chinese or Russian academics may reject these standards, but that doesn’t make them arbitrary—just inconvenient for regimes that fail to meet them. There’s no need for a supranational authority to decide this any more than there is one for physics; standards emerge from scholarly consensus and empirical comparison.

Second, pointing out abuses and contradictions inside democracies doesn’t negate their democratic character. What you describe in France, Greece, Germany, and Spain are are events happening within constitutional systems, not the absence of those systems. Courts overturn referenda because constitutions limit majority rule; executives misuse emergency powers; police and media manipulate narratives. That is democracy functioning badly, not democracy not existing.

The decisive distinction is whether these actions can be challenged, exposed, reversed, and punished. In Europe, governments lose elections, courts rule against executives, journalists investigate police misconduct, and opposition parties—leftist ones included—can recover and return. In Russia, journalists, opposition politicians, and anti‑corruption activists don’t lose court cases; they lose their freedom, their lives, or very famously, fall out of windows.

That is the difference between democracy and dictatorship, comrade.

In Romania, they declared a candidate illegal.

Putin has higher approval ratings than any western leader. Chinese people are happier with their level of democracy than any country in the west.

Our countries are extremely corrupt with elections fully determined by Zionism, CIA and oligarchy, with parliaments/congress providing 0 useful bills of any kind, including avoiding popularly requested freedoms.

An empirical definition of democracy, as best fit, is nations with performative elections that result in a winner that is in full agreement with US foreign policy.

The cognitive dissonance of popular discontent within US's NATO colonies is that because the US is a directly stated enemy intent on destroying them, they would be far more advantaged to be in an alliance with Russia and China, and to contain the US, instead of finding the most extreme way of subjugating themselves harder to the US.