Quote Originally Posted by Tellos Athenaios View Post
What I am saying is that your voting system in the USA implicitly assumes that a sizable number of the electorate silently agrees with what is decided for them by others. Thus, people who didn't bother to give their electoral consent are implicitly presumed to have given it anyway when a party uses super majority, or filibuster tactics in Congress & House of Representatives.
I don't think it assumes that. I've never assumed that. I assume they don't know/don't care. That they are apathetic maybe--or even that they simply don't have the time to make a proper judgment. That they agree with 1 party on somethings but agree with the other party on others. But the whole reason we have a republic instead of direct democracy is that we assume people don't have the necessary amount of time required to decide on everything. It's a natural conclusion from that that they don't all have the time to decide who it is best to vote for.

This is a problem which to some extent exists in any democratic system (because people who vote blank or don't vote can hardly be counted among active supporters of anything regardless), but it is more worrying when you look at the USA with two big amorphous blobs called “Dem & GOP” and less than two thirds bothering to vote for anything at all. So it'd be a stretch of the imagination that with those two amorphous blobs that can't even get all of their own representatives/candidates to speak the same party line somehow all of the people who voted on one of these candidates would do that. Which calls into question what things like a super majority or a filibuster really are worth, in terms of support from the electorate; at which point you have to wonder like pevergreen did: to what extent is the USA system truly (functionally) democratic?
It's not! It's a republic! Or a democratic republic, or whatever you call it. We use the word "democracy" as a general positive term to talk about systems of government that aren't strictly democratic.

Your conclusion is still "dangling"...the idea that the more democratic a government is the better it is. That's an assumption you never quite state.