What differentiates the United States of America from communist China, North Korea, USSR, and Cuba?
I asked this question several times and so far no Americans knew the answer.
All communists dictatorships have written constitutions, more than one branch of government, and democratic elections. They don’t have an electoral college, but Soviet communist ideologists used the electoral college as an example of “oppressive capitalist voting regulations that strip working people from direct participation in the election process.” This means that democratic elections are not the criteria that make the USA so different from communist dictatorships that for decades America was considered as a bastion of freedom and people rescued their lives to get in.
If not elections, then what? To answer this question, we need to set up a few definitions:
Democracy, “rule by people,” is a form of government that is exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
A free society – is a society of free individuals. Free individuals are economically independent individuals who have the capacity, capability, and willingness to defend themselves and their property. (I took this definition from ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior in a natural environment).
Tyrannical society – is a society in which some or most individuals are fully subordinated to other individuals (in other words, some individuals are owned by others). Fascist society, which is a subcategory of tyrannical society, is “a hierarchical society ruled by elites in which individual interests are fully subordinated to the common good” (definition from Encyclopedia Britannica )
Civil society (the rule of law) – a society in which laws constrain ties between different individuals and between individuals and a state. In this sense, civil society is opposite to anarchy, a society in which the state has absolutely no powers and ties between individuals and communities are constrained by morality or the lack of it.
Neither democracy nor the rule of law can prevent a society from becoming a dictatorship. Democracy is just a set of bureaucratic formalities that allow, or pretend to allow, public participation in maintaining a government. Civility is a set of laws that in some societies protects individuals from the tyranny of a state of communities, and in some societies, ensures tyranny. GULAG, Nazi death camps, Chinese, North Korean, and Cuban re-educational camps all happened in democratic civil societies. Neither of these countries is a free society.
A free society can be a civil society only if the state operates with the voluntary informed consent of free individuals and no law or regulation abridges or infringes their natural rights. If the state oversteps its’ authorities or people believe that the legal system is rigged against them, a free society ceases to be civil, or a civil society stops being free and becomes a fascist society.
While no member of a tyrannical society is free, not all members of a free society are free. More importantly, not all members of a free society want to be free. A free society is a society of winners and losers. Some people have more, and some people have less. Some are more talented, and some are less talented. Some are ready to sacrifice everything to make more money, others prefer a sense of fulfillment to financial gains. Some are just too lazy to do any productive work and prefer to beg. Begging the government to take from those who earned their wealth and give to those who want it is easier and less embarrassing than begging people directly. This is why people who are fully dependent on other people’s wealth have tendencies to vote for tyrannical government. To maintain a free society it is crucial to limit government powers and to protect individual rights. In a free civil democratic society, an individual who fully depends on somebody else’s labor cannot have the same voting powers as a free individual.
The United States of America was designed to be a free democratic civil society. This is why the United States of America puts the greatest importance on protecting natural individual rights. This is why they designed the Supreme Law of the land to limit government powers and designate crucial for free society human rights as rights that the government doesn’t grant and that the government cannot take away. This is why America chose an economic system based on free enterprise. This is why the Bill of Rights forbids the government from limiting freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to bear arms. This is what made the USA not only exceptional but exceptionally better than the rest of the world.
Nowadays, American society is not the same country as it was designed to be. The problem is that too many Americans became too addicted to government handovers, and they cannot even think about surviving without the state taking care of them. Too many Americans chose to let the government enslave them for the sake of the illusion of safety and equity. Nowadays, American society is not much different from the Soviet Union when they sold enough natural resources to keep their population out of starvation.
Unlike the USSR, free people still exist in the USA, and these people are not willing to give up on their freedoms. These people have incredible patience and they go to great sacrifices to keep civility, but if they have no choice other than the choice between civil tyranny and a free uncivil society, they will choose freedom. American government and ‘woke’ Americans must keep it in mind when they push this country in the direction that communist dictatorships and Nazi Germany chose for the ‘good’ of their societies.
